Spirit Energy is celebrating its busiest-year-to-date in regards to decommissioning activities across the Central North Sea (CNS), Southern North Sea (SNS) and East Irish Sea.
Some of the recent work to complete includes the final phase of the campaign to remove the DP3 and DP4 installations in the Morecambe Bay development. Allseas completed the work through the use of Pioneering Spirit, the largest and most versatile offshore construction vessel in the world which is capable of lifting entire topsides of up to 48,000 t and jackets up to 20,000 t in a single piece. For this project in the East Irish Sea, a total of 9,000 t of jacket structures were removed in tandem using the jacket lift system and loaded directly onto the Iron lady. It was then to be transferred to Fife for recycling.
In CNS, a 14 well plug and abandonment campaign is being executed from the Well-Safe Defender vessel across four fields: Chestnut, Birch, Larch and Sycamore. Chestnnut’s decommissioning has now been completed.
“The Chestnut campaign has been delivered with exemplary safety and operational performance; this was our ultimate aim when we set out to select our partners for the CNS abandonment campaign. With this first milestone achieved we look forward to the remainder of the campaign,” remarked Nicholas Riley, Well Operations Manager, Spirit Energy.
Meanwhile, in SNS, Heerema Marine Contractors has successfully removed three topsides and three jackets with SSCV Thialf crane vessel. DeepOcean are set to recover subsea infrastructure from six assets later this year. The recycling of the all the structures will be conducted by Thompsons of Prudhoe in the Port of Blyth.
Head of Decommissioning and projects at Spirit Energy, Donald Martin, commented, “Combining decommissioning programmes and supply chain opportunities at portfolio level has created significant economies of scale with our partners leveraging the capability of their assets. This has also helped create opportunities to share campaign management responsibilities, leading to a lean and agile team. The recent successful completion of the removals of the DP3 and DP4 jackets marks a significant milestone towards our longer-term transition plan for the Morecambe hub being converted into a world-class carbon storage cluster.”
Spirit Energy, CEO, Neil McCulloch, concluded, “We are very proud of our efforts and achievements in decommissioning carried out by a first-class team of Spirit employees working collaboratively with the supply chain. Our team has thought strategically and formed long-term, high-value and high-trust relationships with our supply chain partners and we are very pleased to have achieved such a high level of local content and repeat business with UK and Netherlands based firms where our core business lies. Of course, we are also pleased to continually deliver industry leading decommissioning cost performance in line with our stewardship obligations from our regulators.”
