Integrated engineering environment for the process FEED of offshore oil and gas production plants

In this paper, an offshore process front end engineering design (FEED) method is systematically introduced and reviewed to enable efficient offshore oil and gas production plant engineering. An integrated process engineering environment is also presented for the topside systems of a liquefied natural gas floating production, storage, and offloading (LNG FPSO) unit, based on the concepts and procedures for the process FEED of general offshore production plants. Various activities of the general process FEED scheme are first summarized, and then the offshore process FEED method, which is applicable to all types of offshore oil and gas production plants, is presented. The integrated process engineering environment is presented according to the aforementioned FEED method. Finally, the offshore process FEED method is applied to the topside systems of an LNG FPSO in order to verify the validity and applicability of the FEED method.