The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has said it is looking into the recent hydraulic pump failure on the Kraken vessel that caused production to stop.
The HSE said: “We are aware of an incident and are currently looking into the circumstances leading to the shutdown.”
Bumi Armada announced the incident last Monday, saying production had been shut in at its Kraken floating production storage and offload (FPSO) unit following the failure of critical hydraulic submersible pump (HSP) transformers.
The vessel is leased and operated by duty holder Bumi Armada UK on behalf of Kraken field operator EnQuest (70.5%), with the remaining stakes held by Waldorf Petroleum. It has served the namesake oilfield, around 220 miles from Aberdeen, since 2017.
EnQuest and Bumi Armada worked together to carry out a restart of the facility, however, the attempt was unsuccessful.
Bumi said at the time it was working with EnQuest to “assess alternative technical solutions” with an aim of returning to production on a phased basis in the coming weeks.
Last year the HSE warned Bumi Armada over its monitoring and managing of alarms on the vessel.
Inspectors found a lack of suitable measures on the Kraken FPSO to ensure all high priority warnings, including fire and gas detection, were acted upon swiftly in order to prevent a “major accident”.
Almost 1,000 standing alarms – those that are active even though operations are carrying on as usual – were also identified.
Of those, a “significant proportion”, almost 10%, were priority one alarms, nearly double the recommended guidance.
Following these findings, the Health and Safety Executive handed Bumi Armada an improvement notice.
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