As Technip’s project director for the £800million Quad 204 project, Richard Wylie is tasked with restoring one of the North Sea’s prized assets at a crucial time for the industry.
The project involves the redevelopment of the Schiehallion field, 110miles west of Shetland, and the target is to squeeze another 25 years and 450million barrels of oil out of it.
The BP-operated field started producing in 1998, but the old FPSO, which was towed away last year, now needs to be replaced along with subsea infrastructure.
Mr Wylie, who took charge of the project in 2012, said that while Quad 204 is immensely challenging, it is a great project to be managing.
The 59-year-old said he is fully focused on the project to the point where he confesses to having “tunnel vision”.
“We’re sort of in our Quad world and we’re really busy,” said Mr Wylie, whose oil and gas career started in the late 70s and has taken him to Abu Dhabi, Canada, Egypt, France, Norway, Malaysia and the US.
At present, the Deepsea Aberdeen semi-submersible is drilling on Loyal field and will later move on to Schiehallion in advance of first oil from the £850million Glen Lyon FPSO, which arrives next year.
So what makes the project so challenging? After all, Schiehallion is long-established and Technip carried out repair and maintenance work on the field during its previous life, so the firm should know its way around.
For a start, there’s the size and the scale of the operation, which is bigger than anything Technip has done before, said the Oxfordshire native.
Ten vessels and a team of 100 staff members are working on Quad, extending the field with 15 new flow lines, 21 risers, and 14 new wells.
The next complication on Quad is the notoriously harsh west of Shetland weather conditions, which limits the construction season to a six-month spell from April to September.
Also, the fact that it’s a brownfield site actually makes work tricky, rather than simplifying things.
Mr Wylie explained: “It’s a congested seabed and you have to work in and around what’s already there. With a greenfield site you would maybe start small and build up. Because Quad’s an established field you’ve got to have everything ready from day one to start up.”
He added: “People need to remember it’s not life extension. It’s not just keeping it going for another five years or tying back a few extra wells to get the last bit of production out of it. It’s a complete reworking of the whole field. It’s basically (like saying), let’s produce the same again. It produced 450million barrels and there’s the same again to go.”
Mr Wylie says the successful relaunch of the field would be a good news story for Aberdeen and the North Sea energy industry, which has been hit by redundancies and closures amid the oil price slump.
Technip has also found itself in a tough situation, recently announcing plans to axe 6,000 jobs worldwide.
The company declined to say whether any of the 1,200 employees at its base in Westhill, Aberdeenshire, were facing redundancy, but Mr Wylie said his Quad team would not be affected.
Mr Wylie said: “For me the focus for me is on delivering Quad. I think if we can demonstrate that in the current climate we’ve got a successful project and we’re delivering value, we can give everyone confidence.
“If there’s anything we can do to get in early and talk to clients and give them the benefit of what we can add then we’re very keen to do that because we want projects to succeed.”
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