BW Offshore has sold an elderly floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel for $12.8m.
The Oslo-listed company said the Japanese-built, 138,000-dwt BW Cidade de Sao Vicente (built 1976) will be scrapped in compliance with the Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships.
Brokers said the vessel had gone for $490 per ldt, well below current scrap levels of more than $650.
The FPSO, moored in Brazil, will now head to the Priya Blue Industries recycling yard in India.
The ship was once a suezmax tanker called Ellida, sold in 1995 by Morten Werrings Rederi of Norway to an undisclosed buyer for $10m.
BW Offshore has nominated a third party to be on site at the recycling yard to ensure health, safety and environmental regulations are followed.
A demolition plan has been prepared and provided by the yard in cooperation with the Gujarat Maritime Board.
“To further incentivise safe operations, the company will pay a ‘safe recycling’ bonus upon completion,” BW said.
In April last year, BW Offshore rid itself of another costly veteran FPSO when the 274,300-dwt Berge Helene (built 1976) went for $16m to the same breaker.
The company said earlier that year that it had decided to record an impairment to the book value of the Berge Helene and sister FPSOs BW Cidade de Sao Vicente and the 132,500-dwt Espoir Ivoirien (built 1975), amounting to $59.6m in the fourth quarter of 2020.
The impairments reflected continued uncertainty around redeployment and extension for certain older units in the fleet, BW added at the time.
The Berge Helene was a 372-metre-long former VLCC built in France and converted for production work in Singapore in 2005.
It had been laid up in Singapore since August 2018.
