berge helene (From the Australian)To hull and backJune 16,...

berge helene (From the Australian)

To hull and back

June 16, 2004
G'DAY. It's no wonder Woodside is the nation's premier oil and gas company. They fair dinkum work their fingers to the bone.

After 13 days, however, of gruelling back-to-back meetings, a spokesman emerged yesterday to confirm that the oil tanker being used for the Chinguetti project was the Berge Helene.

Not the Marie Helena, as we had speculated.

But yes, it was a 28-year-old single-hulled vessel.

And yes, it was on the Greenpeace blacklist.

But before anybody jumps to the conclusion that the Berge Helene is the pride of Dad's Navy, under the commission of Captain Mainwaring ('Don't be an idiot, Godfrey!'), flanked by Lance Corporal Jones ('Don't panic!') and Private Fraser ('We're doomed!'), the tanker is an FPSO. A Floating Production Storage Offtake Facility, that is.

As the world's oil discoveries become ever smaller, producers are favouring converted tankers (FPSOs) to pipe up oil from the seabed, rather than platforms the likes of which have been piping oil from the Bass Strait for the last 30 years.

BHP pioneered the things. There are five or six vessels now pumping and storing oil off the coast of Australia.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster off Prince William Sound in Alaska and, more recently, the sinking of the Prestige off the coast of Spain just before Christmas in 2002, singled-hulled tankers are on the nose.

The US has already banned them in its waters -- FPSOs included. All tankers must have double hulls, so if the shell is pierced, oil won't spill into the ocean.

After the sinking of the Prestige, whose oil spill wrecked the coastline of Galicia, put thousands of people out of work and killed 15,000 birds, the European Union moved.

It banned single-hulled vessels carrying heavy grades of oil from entering European waters and ordered they be phased out altogether between 2005 and 2010.

In Australia, Woodside proposes to use a double-hulled tanker for its Enfield project, deep offshore in the Carnarvon Basin.

Why, then, would the company opt for a single-hulled ship for Chinguetti, its $700 million discovery in league with junior partners Hardman Resources and Roc Oil?

We don't know yet. One reason might be that a single-hulled FPSO was a lot cheaper.

A second could be that Chinguetti lies a few kilometres off the coast of the African nation of Mauritania.

And unless the authorities in Nouakchott have just signed up Allan Fels, one can assume that regulatory obstacles in Mauritania are less than onerous.