Mexican company Pemex Exploracion y Produccion has begun scheduled maintenance activities on the floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel Yuum K’ak’naab, located in the Campeche Sound in the southern part of the Gulf of Mexico.
Pemex said last week that the maintenance activities on the vessel would be finished on Friday, August 4.
The company added that, due to its technical characteristics, the vessel was given an active and permanent yearly maintenance to ensure operating continuity. The specialized technicians will check safety systems, process, and auxiliary systems.
Due to this scheduled shutdown, the daily production in Ku-Maloob-Zaap will be reduced by approximately 90 thousand barrels of crude oil and 20 million cubic feet of gas per day for the duration of the maintenance of the ship.
According to Pemex, the temporary reduction in production caused by these works has been taken into consideration and does not affect the annual production goal established by the company for this year.
The vessel’s name is a Mayan phrase which, when translated, means Señor del Mar in Spanish or Lord of the Sea in English. The FPSO was built in 1981 and renovated in 2006. Its crude oil processing capacity is 200,000 barrels per day and it has a gas compression capacity of 120 million cubic feet.
The length of the Señor del Mar is almost equal of that to four football fields. The hull of this vessel is eight meters higher than the pyramid of Kukulcan in Chichen Itza which stands at 30 meters, and has an electricity generator that produces 48 megawatts, enough power to cover the needs of 40 thousand homes.
The Señor del Mar FPSO has been operating continuously in the Ku-Maloob-Zaap field since June 23, 2007. The Pemex-operated field is located off the coast of Campeche, 65 miles northeast of Ciudad del Carmen. It covers an area of 121 square kilometers and includes five fields: Ku, Maloob, Zaap, Bacab, Lum, and Zazil-Ha.
The KMZ development included drilling 82 wells, the FPSO, and 17 platforms: seven for drilling, four for production, four for accommodation, one for telecommunication, and one for processing. There are also 42 pipelines totaling 189 kilometers in length.