MARCH saw the first of a number of large contract awards made by Total with Laggan-Tormore partner DONG. Corus secured an order worth almost £200million to supply more than 520km (150,000 tonnes) of pipeline sections at its site in Hartlepool.
Other large packages are in bid and project director Robert Faulds told Energy that the next long lead item package would be the subsea production system – wellheads, manifolds and associated equipment.
Faulds said: “We anticipate awarding this in April and two are bidding. The third main package is the earthworks, and this has already been awarded. We’re hopefully going to have people working on site as early as this week (week beginning March 22). The contractor is Roadbridge and their peak in terms of the number of people on site will be around 80. They will finish spring 2011.”
Faulds said, too, that offshore construction would start in the summer of 2011 – picking the best weather to carry out pipe-lay operations east and west of Shetland. This would be followed in 2012 by the placing of subsea production infrastructure.
“We’re tendering for a subsea contractor at the moment and anticipate awarding a contract in next two months,” said Faulds.
He added that Laggan-Tormore was keeping a team of 45 at Total’s North Sea HQ in Aberdeen very busy.
It was ODE (jointly owned by Saipem and Doris Engineering) that carried out front-end engineering and design for Laggan-Tormore – subsea facilities, pipelines, onshore terminal and associated works. Not only are such contracts hugely important to the companies that win them, the entire project is vital to the Shetland economy … near and long-term; near because of the contracts phase, long because Laggan-Tormore is just the start of the gas push West of Shetland.
However, despite some 40 years of close involvement with the North Sea industry, Faulds told Energy that Total could not simply assume it could walk in and build without first engaging closely with the local community.
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