Triton is nearly a year late, but given the complexity of the process, the partners are pleased with the accomplishment.

Back in 1998, Amerada Hess Corp. said the target first oil date for its massive Triton project was May 1999. Only in April did the Triton floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel start pumping oil, exploiting three North Sea fields, Bittern, Guillemot West and Guillemot North West.
Once it was built, the vessel languished in a UK port for months waiting for the right weather window before it could sail out to its location in the Central North Sea.
Triton was an FPSO fast-track project. In other words, the operator hoped to bring it onstream as quickly as possible. But it was almost a year late.
During that time, oil prices went through the kind of convolutions that could not have helped the project team finalize the development scheme; the price of a barrel has varied from US $11/bbl in December 1998 to more than $30/bbl.
In 1998, Amerada Hess bravely predicted "a target date of May 1999 for first oil."
Triton began pumping its first barrels at 11:14 p.m., April 15, 2000 - 11 months later than originally intended.
"We promised people that this thing would be in 1999, and we did not get there," said John Moseley, Amerada Hess's Triton project manager.
However, that time lag was not entirely Amerada's fault.
Much of it can be blamed on the vagaries of the weather in the North Sea, which kept the completed production ship stuck at Tees Offshore Base in the United Kingdom until a combination of a suitable tide and a weather window became available for it to be towed out to the three fields it was scheduled to exploit.
That necessary combination arrived at 12:40 a.m., March 17, allowing the huge ship to slip out of her berth on the Tees and put out into the North Sea. Four weeks later she was producing oil.
That was the downside. What about the upside?
First, the field is now onstream, producing revenue for the field partners.
Triton is a complex project, and it required a complex solution. It comprises three fields, up to 22 miles (35km) apart. Three wells - one from Bittern and two from the Guillemot area - are online, and production is at 28,000 b/d.
Originally the project budget was US $880 million (£550 million), and Moseley said that has been undercut by 5%.
"We could have done better on the schedule and on the FPSO," Moseley conceded, but he is quick to point out the unit spent 3½ months on Teesside waiting to sail. "It is one of the most complicated FPSOs - the second most complicated. The most complex is the Schiehallion. This is the next one down."
The FPSO features separate oil separator trains for the Bittern and Guillemot fields, in addition to a test separator. The gas export line is as big as one of Amerada's other main producing assets in the North Sea, Scott. There are also two gas trains. "It gives us flexibility," said the project boss. That flexibility extends to the toroidal swivel - the heart of the ship, which allows the unit to weathervane through 360° and permits production to flow from flexible risers into the vessel. Amerada Hess has fitted the swivel with spare capacity, allowing a further four risers to be tied into the ship, giving the FPSO capacity to take further production, either from third parties or satellite fields.
Amerada's contract strategy was to go for functional specifications only, with some parameters, and so the operator duly agreed a turnkey engineering, procurement, installation and commissioning contract with Kværner for delivery of a completed FPSO. That was due to have been achieved by May 1999, Moseley said. "We had a contract that said May," he said. "Our date (for first oil) was September 1999, which we thought was achievable."
But man-hours needed to finish the vessel were underestimated, he said. "We did not really get the production that we were hoping for."
All of this was happening at a time when the future of Kværner's Port Clarence yard was in doubt. "When it was ready in the third week of November, we could not get out of the Tees," the project manager said. "The yard was closing down, and trying to get work done at weekends was very, very difficult. The man-hours kept going up. That is the way of the world."
Port Clarence is in the process of being sold.
Newbuild
Amerada decided on a newbuild vessel and bought a double-skinned hull from South Korea's Samsung. Sembawang Engineering in Singapore strengthened the hull and added a support structure for the palleted process modules.
Kværner Oil and Gas then came into the picture. Kværner's Port Clarence yard on Teesside in the UK designed and constructed the process topsides packages, which then were fitted onto the vessel at Tees Offshore Base. Lewis Offshore in Stornoway, Scotland, supplied the turret on the ship.
Additionally, Coflexip Stena Offshore was responsible for supplying risers to the ship, and Stolt Comex Offshore performed offshore installation.
The vessel is moored between the Bittern and Guillemot clusters - 14 miles (22km) from Bittern and 10 miles (16km) from Guillemot West.
Consequently the production system had to incorporate full pigging facilities to mitigate the risks of wax and hydrate formation in production flowlines. Also, provision is included for methanol injection and control umbilicals, thus giving a complicated subsea layout.
The layout of the three fields is complex due to the fact that they share one production facility, which is moored between them.
There are 100 miles (160km) of pipelines, plus 25 miles (40km) of control and umbilical lines.
Six production wells are on Bittern (four producers, two water injectors). Four producers are on Guillemot West, and one single producer is on Guillemot North West.
Ownership
In March 1998, the then field partners - Shell Expro, Texaco, Amerada Hess, Enterprise Oil, Deminex and Hardy Oil and Gas - received the green light from the UK Department of Trade and Industry to go ahead with the joint development of Bittern, Guillemot West and Guillemot North West.
Time and mergers and acquisitions have seen that group become Amerada Hess, Shell, Enterprise Veba Oil and Gas, and Paladin (formerly Pittencrief Resources).
Deminex changed to a reorganization of its parent, Germany's Veba Oel.
Amerada has the "duty holder" responsibility for the FPSO, and Shell the operatorship of Bittern, while the operatorship of the other two fields passed from Shell to Veba once the project came onstream.
To bring Triton onstream as quickly as possible, all production facilities were hooked on board the vessel and tested to ensure the commissioning process was as complete as possible before the unit moved offshore. Consequently, it only took 4 weeks once the ship was at the field location before it went into production.
It took Sembawang 2 months to modify the hull between August and November 1998, and from there the unit sailed to Teesside, where it arrived Dec. 6, 1998, for the start of the fitting-out process, which took nearly a year. It was ready to sail in November 1999, but the weather closed in and prevented the unit leaving the port for months.