Development of production platforms for promising Russian offshore areas in the Barents and Kara Seas and on Sakhalin island sets a challenge to overcome their extremely harsh environmental conditions. These are to manage ice in winter and heavy waves in other seasons (platforms and terminals in the Barents Sea) and, in addition, seismic events up to Force 9 (Sakhalin, the Sea of Okhotsk). Some experience has been gained in the design and installation of fixed ice-resistant platforms on the Russian offshore, for example, gravity-based «Vityaz» platform with a soil core («Sakhalin-II» field) deployed at a depth of 32 m. Gravitybased «Prirazlomnaya» platform for the Pechora Sea will be deployed at a depth of 19 m to operate under severe ice conditions. There is also a design of a piled platform developed by Exxon- Mobil for «Sakhalin-I» field. This paper presents an overview of general design principles for offshore ice-resistant platforms for the Russian offshore resulting from the design experience and comparison of Russian and Western codes and rules.
This paper overviews design peculiarities of offshore ice-resistant fixed platforms designated for the Russian offshore (the Barents and Kara Seas and Sakhalin island). Unusually severe combination of environmental conditions in these seas is the major peculiarity of the Russian offshore. At the same time significant oil and gas reserves explored in these areas make the production reasonable and profitable. Design of these facilities calls for a new approach to standards, rules and codes and, first of all, for the development of estimation procedures and assignment of environmental loads. A difficult problem is to assign reasonable combinations of environmental loads, including those with a principally different recurrence period. Thus, a new approach to this problem is called for, an approach different from the proven western ones.
