Lukoil installs living quarters jacket at Caspian Sea field

Russian oil and gas company Lukoil has completed the installation of a jacket for an accommodation platform topside at the V.I. Grayfer field in the Caspian Sea.

Lukoil said on Monday that the offshore operations on the field, named after its recently deceased chairman and “founding father” of the Soviet oil industry Valery Isaakovich Grayfer, involved 110 workers and nine vessels.

The facility was brought to the offshore installation site via the Volga-Caspian Shipping Canal. After the floatover and grounding, the substructures were fixed with ten piles of 56 meters in length each and with a total weight of 1,700 tonnes. When installed and fixed, the facility was inspected by divers.

Like all other platforms of the company in the Caspian Sea, the living quarters platform jacket was constructed at the shipyards of the Astrakhan region.

According to Lukoil, the design life of the facility is 35 years and is built to endure significant ice loads.

The company plans to install a jacket for its offshore ice-resistant fixed platform at the same field later this year and mount living quarters and platform topsides on the substructures in 2021.

Production at the V.I. Grayfer field is scheduled for 2022 with a planned production rate at 1.2 million tonnes of oil.

To remind, Lukoil launched the jacket for the Valery Grayfer field living quarters platform in early April.

Grayfer himself died only days later following the launch of the jacket. He was a man with a rare distinction of having an oil field named after him while he was still alive.