Chevron Anchor

Digital delivery for deepwater.

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 delivered 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 our delivery of 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 had 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 has paved the way for future ultra-high pressure, high temperature discoveries globally.

Read Chevron’s Anchor production announcement

"Today we celebrate a major milestone - it has been an honor to support Chevron from conception through the completion of detailed engineering to installation and startup for this world class project.

Our remarkable people worked closely with Chevron to unlock the most viable design and technology for this project. Production of oil and natural gas from Anchor is an announcement of critical energy security that the world needs, and a successful demonstration for future high-pressure, high temperate discoveries globally."

Jeremy Hall, Senior Vice President of Oil, Gas and New Energies Americas and former Project Manager for the Anchor project