Chevron Anchor

Anchor is the industry’s first deepwater ultra-high pressure development to achieve a final investment decision and one of the largest projects in the US energy industry. The discovery, in Block 807 of the Green Canyon Protraction Area, is located approximately 225km off the coast of Louisiana, US in more than 1,500m of water.

With over 30 years’ experience designing deepwater developments, Wood is delivering a unique, fully integrated engineering design for the project topsides and subsea systems incorporating risers, production flowlines, export pipelines and flow assurance analysis.

With an operating pressure of 20,000 psi, Anchor is one of the industry’s first ultra-high pressure projects. The semi-submersible floating production unit employed on the development has a design capacity of 75,000 barrels of crude oil and 28 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, with the potential for future expansion.

As a strategic contractor for project delivery with a 20+ year relationship with the client, Wood was challenged by Chevron to create an economically viable facility design which can be leveraged for future similar discoveries. By revolutionising how we deliver an engineering scope of this scale, our people were able to execute the project via a digital cloud-based delivery model, using data to drive design.

The project has 200+ Wood team members working remotely alongside Chevron. During the Covid-19 pandemic, our teams transitioned to working from home in only one month after the start of the detailed design phase without any scheduling issues.

The technology and processes developed for this milestone project by Chevron, Wood and other strategic contractors will pave the way for future ultra-high pressure, high temperature discoveries globally.