ENERGY NEWS
11
JANUARY 2022
UK NORTH SEA
Energy Review By Tsvetana Paraskova
Well drilling and maintenance activity, Shell’s move to the UK and its withdrawal
Despite the COVID-induced slowdown in 2020, significant opportunities in well intervention remain in the UK Continental Shelf, the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) said in its second Wells Insight report published in early December with data for 2020. The number of Exploration and Appraisal wellbores spudded has declined steadily due to the COVID impact, to nine in 2020, down from 29 in 2019, the report found. However, success rates have improved, and operators have discovered over half a billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) in the past three years, OGA said. A total of 73 new development wells were completed in 2020, down from the 2019 high of 106 wells. Yet, total development drilling spend remained high in 2020, over £2.1 billion, largely because of the more complex developments, such as high-pressure, hightemperature (HPHT) fields, the report showed.
from the Cambo
Total well stock has remained flat over the past four years as the number of new wells was offset by the plugging and abandonment of others.
oil and gas
OGA’s report also found that intervention costs are declining which makes wellbore interventions an economically attractive operation for operators to restore well production.
project, and field development plans were the key themes in the UK North Sea oil and gas sector in the final weeks of 2021.
“The pandemic clearly affected industry’s activity in 2020, but there are significant opportunities available to Operators to improve production performance through more well interventions,” Carlo Procaccini, OGA Head of Technology, said. OGA is also awarding three studies of three selected winners to share a £1 million prize to advance electrification plans for the oil and gas industry offshore. The winners are Orcadian Energy as a project lead for innovative concepts for the electrification of offshore installations in the Central Graben area; Orsted as a project lead in a study addressing technical and commercial requirements of windfarm connections with offshore installations; and Katoni Engineering for its idea of an optimised interface for distributed offshore renewable sources supplying existing offshore installations with secure and low-emissions power.
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“Rapid progress on platform electrification is vital to ensure that production emissions are halved by 2030, in line with agreed targets,” Dr Andy Samuel, OGA Chief Executive, said. Carlo Procaccini, OGA Head of Technology, commented: “Decarbonisation of oil and gas operations is an industry imperative over the next decade, and platform electrification from renewable sources will be an effective way to achieve that.”
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