World’s largest semi joins DNV GL fleet

Ocean GreatWhite

AUGUST 8, 2016 — DNV GL has welcomed the world’s largest semi-submersible drilling rig into class.Ocean GreatWhite is 123 m long and 78 m wide and was delivered at the Ulsan, South Korea, shipyard of Hyundai Heavy Industries.

Owned by the Houston-based drilling contractor Diamond Offshore, the rig will be chartered to oil major BP and will operate in the Great Australian Bight.

The rig is the first built to a new Moss CS60E design and is a high specification state-of- the art semi-submersible drilling unit suitable for operations in harsh environments.

“The Ocean GreatWhite is a unique rig purposely built for drilling in harsh environments,” said Karl Sellers, SVP Technical Services at Diamond Offshore. “HHI and DNV GL were integral in helping us get this rig to market as we prepare for the drilling project in Australia with BP.”

“We have a strong relationship with both DNV GL and Diamond Offshore – and it is thanks to this good cooperation that the project went so well. We are proud to deliver the first drilling ship of this size and look forward to many more projects on this scale,” said HHI senior executive VP Youngseuk Han. “We will keep moving the boundaries of technology by completing further large-scale and innovative projects.”

“Ocean GreatWhite is capable of operating in depths of up to 3,000 m and can drill down to a depth of 10,670 m. It represents the state of the art in the semi-submersible sector and we are very pleased to have been asked to contribute our expertise to this project,” says Paal Johansen, Vice President and Regional Director, Americas at DNV GL.

Ocean GreatWhite is the first newbuild rig to receive the DNV GL Integrated Software Dependent Systems (ISDS) notation.

ISDS are systems whose performance is dependent on the overall behavior of their integrated software components. The ISDS standard helps owners and operators minimize software integration errors and delays in projects involving complex integrated systems.

The certification ensures that software and integration issues are identified and resolved early on during the project design stages. It takes a new approach to verification, emphasizing a review of the working methods and processes that lead to the delivery the systems, rather than simply focusing on the final review of documents and installations to ensure they meet product requirements.

Industry data suggest that high spec mobile offshore drilling units may experience 30 percent down-time in their first years of operations, making essential a systematic framework for ensuring that ISDS achieve the required reliability, availability, maintainability and safety.

“We expect that the operational performance of Ocean GreatWhite will demonstrate how the ISDS notation can contribute to increasing the reliability of the complex systems onboard,” says Paal Johansen.