Two floating production facilities, 200km offshore, with no easy way to send an engineer out. INPEX needed critical communications recorded reliably - and needed an Australian partner who could support it.
The Ichthys gas and condensate field sits in the Browse Basin, around 200 km off the north coast of Western Australia. INPEX produces from two floating facilities moored over the field, the Ichthys Explorer central processing facility (CPF) and the Ichthys Venturer floating production, storage and offloading vessel (FPSO), and pipes the gas 890 km to its onshore plant in Darwin.
CallTech began supporting INPEX in 2017, about a year before LNG production started.
The Issue
INPEX needed every critical communication on both facilities recorded: public address systems, Rohill TETRA radios, Cisco telephones and satellite phones. The sites are hard to reach, so the system had to be reliable, simple for site staff to operate, and supported by an Australian partner who could do most of the work remotely.
The Solution
Red Box was chosen because it captures all four sources in a single recorder, rather than one recorder per device type, and because it is straightforward to use.
CallTech supplied and maintains a recorder and an archive media server on each facility. Archives from the FPSO are backed up to the CPF, and the CPF archives are backed up to the FPSO, so neither site holds the only copy of a recording.
The media servers were originally physical machines. In 2023 CallTech replaced them with new recorders and virtual media servers, cutting rack space, power and maintenance offshore while keeping the same cross-site redundancy.
Every critical communication on both offshore facilities is captured in a single system per site, with each site holding a copy of the other. The 2023 virtualisation cut space, power and maintenance offshore while keeping the same redundancy.