Thursday 14 September 2017

Hurricane Energy is expected to announce today that the Aoka Mizu floating production, storage and offloading vessel is en route to Dubai for the upgrades required to deploy the unit on the company’s Lancaster fractured basement field off the UK.

According to industry sources, the Bluewater Energy Services-owned vessel is expected to arrive at a facility, understood to be Dubai Drydocks, by early October.

The vessel left Gdansk in Poland in late July.

It is understood that construction of the mooring buoy that will keep the unit stationed on the west of Shetland field is also taking place at the same yard.

The FPSO is set to be deployed as a so-called early production system (EPS) to target a limited volume of the oil in place at Lancaster.

Hurricane is expected to take a final investment decision imminently on the EPS project under an ambitious schedule that will see first oil achieved in the first half of 2019.

The scheme is planned to provide valuable production data that will help to reveal exactly how many barrels can be recovered profitably from the field and Hurricane’s other nearby fractured basement discoveries, including Halifax, which have reservoirs whose behaviour can be notoriously difficult to predict.

Hurricane chief executive Robert Trice stated last month that about 1000 tonnes of steel recently arrived at a yard for the buoy construction but at the time declined to name the facility.

According to Hurricane’s competent person’s report, prepared by consultancy RPS, the EPS is expected to produce a total 37.3 million barrels of proven and probable reserves over six years.

Under a 10-year scenario, the amount of recoverable volumes is expected to be 62.1 million barrels.

If the EPS goes to plan, it will not only de-risk the Lancaster field but also unlock the rest of the portfolio, paving the way for a much larger full-field development in the area.

Lancaster is located in UK blocks 205/21a, 205/22a and 205/26b.