Only the queens minions from Houston have been stupid enough to designe and build open air skids in the arctic. I haven't seen one of those abominations floated since their heyday in the mid 2000's and had several projects to partially enclose most of them. Then again with the recent re-org and moving management decisions to the young hot shots in the Anchorage tower I could see many bright ideas in the future
The MAPS will be fully enclosed heated skids with fire protection. As they said in the presentation, "We're not a major who can afford to write off a plant if it blows up, the plant is our asset, not the field."
I don't know what the major's economic threshold is, but from the projects I've been involved in the only fields developed have a minimum daily production of 10,000 bpd. There are hundreds of "puddles" that will produce 1000's of bbl's/day. Even at a nominal 1000 bbl/day and $50/bbl that's $18 million a year per puddle. Bring a couple puddles on line and you're talking real money. Though what the state really needs is some elephants to get us back to 1 mil bbd, an extra 50-100k bbd sure would help in the near term.
