Oil and Gas Technology Centre (OGTC) bosses have said they are “pretty confident” a revolutionary new contraption for recovering platform jackets will grace the North Sea despite one of the firms behind it going bust.
A decommissioning consortium has found a new member to complete its triumvirate after one of the founding partners pulled out.
A group of operators is making progress on plans to work together on the decommissioning of oil and gas infrastructure worth billions of pounds that sits east of Shetland, an industry chief said.
In just four years, Ardent Global has evolved from being solely focused on emergency management services and wreck removal to a company that has also expanded into the offshore decommissioning and the subsea sector.
Ardent, the premier marine salvage, emergency response and decommissioning contractor, has completed the design of an external buoyancy system called Archimedes, to recover jackets.
Buoyancy systems, laser cutting tools and thermite plugs all feature in a combined effort by industry and academia to turn the north-east into the world’s leading provider of decommissioning technology.
Decommissioning is now a significant part of the landscape of activity in the UKCS – annual decommissioning expenditure has topped £1 billion since 2015 and may come close to £2bn when Oil and Gas UK reports its estimate for 2018 later this month.