Dana offers up work to ‘kill’ Western Isles wells

Dana Petroleum has offered up tenders to “kill” the Harris and Barra wells at its ill-fated Western Isles project.

The Dana-operated oil field shut down production eight years earlier than scheduled as it deemed the project “uneconomic”.

The work being offered up calls for a “light well intervention vessel” to “kill and plug” the wells. Each contract is worth less than £25 million, according to the North Sea Transition Authority’s (NSTA) Pathfinder service.

There are four wells at Harris and a further three at Barra that need work with the two locations up for separate tenders.

This is part of a well decommissioning campaign that is set for 2026 to 2028.

When Western Isles started up in 2017, Dana said it expected 15+ years of production.

However, plans submitted to regulator OPRED last year by Dana shared that the project would shut down in March of this year.

Aberdeen’s NEO Energy owned a 23.08% stake in the project and was reported as taking a $77.3m impairment on the project “driven primarily by a reduction to the expected life of the field”.

NEO later bought the field’s namesake floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel for its Buchan redevelopment project, work on which has since been delayed.

Western Isles was the culmination of the Harris and Barra fields and is located around 99 miles east of the Shetlands and 7 miles west of Tern field.

The UK Government first gave approval for the project back in December 2012.

TAQA offers up decom work

© Supplied by OKEA

This month’s Pathfinder update was dominated by decommissioning projects, namely from TAQA as it looked to progress shut down work at its historic Brae field.

Additionally, the North Sea operator offered up work, in the same value band as Dana Petroleum’s Wester Isles tenders, for the disconnection of satellite fields in the Northern North Sea.

These fields include Pelican, Otter, Cladhan, Hudson, Kestrel and Falcon.

There was also work offered up in for Brae and the listed projects includes the flushing and displacement of produced fluids and disconnecting pipelines.