Offshore Concrete Structure - Floating Structures

Floating Structures

Since concrete is quite resistant to corrosion from salt water and keeps maintenance costs low, floating concrete structures have become increasingly attractive to the oil and gas industry in the last two decades. Temporary floating structures such as the Condeep platforms float during construction but are towed out and finally ballasted until they sit on the sea floor. Permanent floating concrete structures have various uses including the discovery of oil and gas deposits, in oil and gas production, as storage and offloading units and in heavy lifting systems.

Common designs for floating concrete structures are the barge or ship design, the platform design (semi-submersible, TLP) as well as the floating terminals e.g. for LNG.

Floating production, storage, and offloading systems (FPSOS) receive crude oil from deep-water wells and store it in their hull tanks until the crude is transferred into tank ships or transport barges. In addition to FPSO’s, there have been a number of ship-shaped Floating Storage and Offloading (FSO) systems (vessels with no production processing equipment) used in these same areas to support oil and gas developments. An FSO is typically used as a storage unit in remote locations far from pipelines or other infrastructures.