Beacon Offshore and Claxton, the lead brand for the Acteon drilling and decommissioning business segment, have signed a master services agreement for the severance and recovery of more than 100 subsea wells in the Gulf of Thailand.
While detailed information of the agreement has so far been withheld, Sam Hanton, CEO of Claxton, stated, “The relationship with Beacon Offshore is a milestone for long-term collaboration in the region which was underpinned by significant effort and commitment by all parties.
“We are very excited about this project as it highlights Claxton’s rigless P&A capabilities and reflects the expertise of Claxton as a trusted partner in vessel-based decommissioning.”
Asia Pacific decommissioning
This is the latest agreement regarding decommissioning operations in Asia Pacific, a market which is expected to take off in the next few years largely due to the shared global desire to limit climate impact by ensuring abandoned wells are properly plugged and abandoned with infrastructure removed. While, traditionally, complicated government regulation and lack of experience has restricted such campaigns in the region, this problem is fast becoming too large to ignore, especially with a large number of fields approaching the end of their production life.
As Jean-Baptiste Berchoteau, Wood Mackenzie’s Asia upstream analyst, told Breakbulk last year, “With more than 380 fields expecting to cease production in the next decade, the magnitude and cost of work can no longer be ignored. Through learning from global decommissioning projects, the industry can adopt and adapt practices best suited for Asia-Pacific’s own set of challenges.”
Breakbulk noted that across the 380 fields there are 35,000 offshore wells, serviced by 2,600 platforms representing 7.5 million tonnes of steel and more than 55,000km of pipelines which will need to be retired in the forthcoming years – representing an enormous challenge which operators will have to deal with in order to meet their environmental commitments. Such a challenge, however, opens a very promising door for service providers such as Claxton who in the coming years will no doubt be called into action to conduct more decommissioning operations in this region.
