The Oil and Gas Technology Centre (OGTC) is getting ready to loosen its purse strings to bring down the cost of well plug and abandonment (P&A).
Oil and Gas UK’s 2016 Decommissioning Insight report forecasts £17.6billion of spending on the sector between 2016 and 2025.
Well P&A is estimated to require the most significant spend, accounting for 47% of the total.
OGTC will spend £1million on developing transformational well P&A technologies that can take a chunk out of cost projections.
It recently asked organisations to submit their ideas and received 45 responses.
OGTC is prioritising projects that can be delivered within two years and will now whittle down the number of funding applications.
Firstly, it will have the concepts assessed independently by a review panel.
Proposals which survive the examination will then go to the OGTC team for further development.
Finally, the projects will be reviewed with industry partners to enable final investment decisions to be taken, leading to project sanction.
Malcolm Banks, OGTC well construction solution centre manager, said: “We’re delighted with the response to our first Call for Ideas.
“There is an urgency from industry to find more cost-effective and efficient methods of P&A and we hope the ideas submitted are the next step in delivering this.
“We received a wide range of ideas across the three themes and we look forward to working with our expert panel to review these in the coming weeks.”
OGTC, which officially launched in February, is set to receive £180million through the Aberdeen City Region Deal for investing in the development and deployment of new products and processes that can reduce costs.
It has two further Calls for Ideas ongoing, focused on using robotics to enhance pressure vessel and tank integrity, and solutions which could help unlock the 225 marginal discoveries in small pools across the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS).
