North Sea

Many of the platforms in the North Sea are late in life, operating long past their initial design expectations due to costly life-extension work. Decommissioning has moved slowly, but the low price environment is likely to accelerate the trend.

Large areas of the North Sea contain Cretaceous sediments, which form a massive hard layer of chalk that historically has presented a major drilling risk and expense to operators in the area.

This paper presents current advances in the development of a plasma-based milling tool and its use in casing-section milling for P&A.

The global industry is feeling the pain of the oil price plunge, but the UK feels it more acutely. Exploration drilling is at rock bottom levels, the offshore UK Continental Shelf is one of the world’s most expensive from which to produce a barrel of oil, and investment spending is expected to fall.

In a down market, plugging and abandoning North Sea wells looks like an opportunity. The cost for operators is reduced because the government is paying more than half of the cost of the work, and many service companies hungry for work are offering discounts.

The ability to predict the effect of faults on locating remaining hydrocarbon is critical to optimal well-placement, reservoir-management, and field development decisions.

This paper reviews two newly developed novel completion systems that significantly reduce time spent performing multistage stimulation in environments where cost and consequence of failure are high.

There are more than 100 accumulations in the southern North Sea that are flagged as stranded fields. One of these stranded tight gas fields, the Kew field, has been developed successfully with the use of a subsea well, horizontal drilling, and hydraulic fracturing.

This paper describes the measures put in place so that the mooring system of the Gryphon Alpha FPSO could be replaced and reconnected on an efficient schedule.

This study concerns the mature Gyda reservoir, where some recent production wells have underperformed relative to equivalent initial wells.