OneSubsea Takes Umbilicals Contract for Azule's West Hub Tails Off Angola
The package reroutes four Block 15/06 fields from the ageing Ngoma FPSO to the new Agogo unit
SLB OneSubsea has landed a controls umbilical contract from Azule Energy for the West Hub Tails project offshore Angola, adding another subsea package to a redevelopment that will shift production away from an ageing floater.
The subsea specialist will design and deliver the additional controls umbilicals needed to redirect output from the Sangos, Ochigufu, Mpungi and Vandumbu fields in Block 15/06. Those four fields have produced through the Ngoma FPSO since 2014, and the floater is now approaching the end of its design life.
West Hub Tails forms part of Azule's wider Integrated West Hub development. Once the rerouting is complete, production from the existing fields will flow to Agogo, which recently joined the development and has been designed with a range of emissions-reduction systems. OneSubsea has previously supplied umbilicals for the West Hub production centres as well as for the Agogo and Ndungu tiebacks, so the award extends an installed base rather than opening a new one.
The latest contract is separate from the West Hub Tails package placed with TechnipFMC earlier in the development cycle, which covers flexible flowlines, risers and associated equipment. Splitting the scope this way is standard on tieback-heavy redevelopments, where the control umbilicals and the production lines follow different engineering and delivery paths.
Azule, the 50:50 joint venture between BP and Eni, contracted Yinson Production for Agogo under a 15-year firm deal with extension options, valued at up to about $5.7bn. The FPSO has capacity to produce 120,000 barrels of oil per day.
Redeployment projects of this kind are becoming a larger share of the West African subsea market. Rather than retire fields whose reservoirs still hold recoverable volumes, operators are moving the surface infrastructure and reusing the wells beneath it, which turns a decommissioning decision into a procurement round for umbilicals, risers and controls. For offshore vessel and equipment suppliers, the tails of mature developments now sit alongside greenfield work in the order book.
