Shearwater to Resume ‘Sooner than Expected’
Wednesday 21 December 2016
Production from Shell’s Shearwater platform is expected to resume sooner than expected after good progress to make safe a problem high-pressure/high-temperature (HPHT) well, the company has said.
A Shell spokesperson said on Wednesday that “remediation work” has been completed following an unplanned shutdown on 2 December when an alarm was triggered during work on a new development well.
Shell said only last week it expected production to be offline “for a number of weeks”.
Staff are in the process of being flown back to the platform, which is located in Block 22/30b in the central North Seaabout 220 kilometres east of Aberdeen.
“The work has taken less time than expected,” a spokesperson stated. “Production from the field will gradually resume over the coming days.”
It is understood that Shell has not yet rectified or fully assessed what went wrong with the SW-04 well.
Rather, it is understood the remediation work means the SW-04 well is at least now in a safe condition to allow production to resume from other wells.
Any further work on the SW-04 well has been suspended while an investgation take place, it is understood.
Following the alarm, 62 non-essential personnel staff were returned to Aberdeen as a precaution.
There were no injuries and there was no loss of containment of hydrocarbons from the damaged well.
Shell has not commented further on the causes of the incident, though sources have previously indicated it was due to a possible “communication” between two annuli – the gaps between well casings – on the field’s SW-04 well.
The jack-up Noble Hans Deul, which is carrying out a development drilling campaign on Shearwater, was understood to have suspended operations immediately on a subsequent well on the same reservoir – SW-05 – when the alarm was triggered.
Output from Shearwater is exported though the SEAL System, which also takes production from Total’s Elgin-Franklin fields to the Bacton Gas Terminal on the Norfolk coast.
A Total spokesman said there has been no impact on Elgin output.
According to the latest available data from the UK Oil & Gas Authority, Shearwater output in July was 22,432 barrels of oil equivalent per day of liquids and 138 million cubic feet per day of associated gas.