FPSO

Picture a ship that never actually goes anywhere, permanently moored above an offshore oil field, quietly processing crude as it comes up from the seabed and storing it until a tanker arrives to carry it away. That vessel is an FPSO, a Floating Production Storage and Offloading unit.

FPSOs are especially useful for offshore fields, particularly deepwater ones, where building a fixed platform and a subsea pipeline all the way to shore would be prohibitively expensive or technically difficult. The FPSO itself handles initial processing, separating oil, gas and water, stores the crude onboard, and periodically offloads it directly to a shuttle tanker moored alongside, avoiding the need for a permanent pipeline to land altogether.

ONGC has used FPSO style vessels for some of its offshore fields, and any deepwater or ultra deepwater block awarded under recent OALP rounds is a genuine candidate for FPSO based development, given how much cheaper it can be than laying new subsea pipeline infrastructure to remote fields.