'Hope Six', a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel manufactured by COSCO (Qidong) Offshore Co for Dana Petroleum [Photo/ntfabu.com]

COSCO (Qidong) Offshore Co, based in Qidong, a county-level city in Nantong, East China's Jiangsu province, received a letter of congratulations from its client Dana Petroleum, based in the United Kingdom, on Jan 15.

The letter was to meant to congratulate the company on its efforts to design and build a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel for Dana in 2017.

K. Williams, head of Dana's operated assets and capital projects, expressed his approval on behalf of the company for the vessel's remarkable performance over the past two years.

He said that the FPSO reached its maximum production capacity after just four months of operation and had undertaken more than 80 separate operations and produced 25 million barrels of oil.

The vessel's operational efficiency was above 90 percent, much higher than the average for the North Sea, where the FPSO operates.

Its safety record was also excellent, with far fewer incidents than the company's average.

The letter noted that the vessel successfully withstood a 100-year storm with waves up to 28 meters high. It was the only vessel capable of operating during the storm, as all others in the field were shut down for weather-related reasons.

The FPSO was the first EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) shipping project the Chinese manufacturer had undertaken for a foreign client.

The circular vessel is 36.5 m in height, 78 m in diameter, and weighs nearly 28,000 tons. It is capable of processing 50,000 barrels of liquid gas and 44,000 barrels of oil per day. Its maximum oil storage capacity is 400,000 barrels.