Norway’s AF Gruppen, acting through its subsidiary AF Offshore Decom and in consortium with Heerema Marine Contractors, has been awarded a contract by a North Sea operator to remove and dispose of one of the operator’s platforms on the UK Continental Shelf.

The client was not named, but the company said the award marks the third contract the consortium has received from this client in the last year.

AF Gruppen is a publicly listed Norwegian construction and engineering group headquartered in Oslo, and AF Offshore Decom is its specialist arm for offshore removal and recycling work. Heerema Marine Contractors (HMC), based in the Netherlands, is a marine contractor whose heavy-lift crane vessels are used for platform installation and removal operations in the North Sea and other offshore basins. Such vessels are built to raise large topsides in single or few lifts, which limits the time and offshore work involved in a removal campaign.

The facility covered by the new contract features a steel structure, with the topsides weighing approximately 23,000 tonnes and the supporting structure around 12,000 tonnes. The contract also includes an option to remove selected conductors and subsea structures, work that sits alongside the well-abandonment and seabed clean-up normally involved in retiring an offshore field.

Offshore platform surveys will commence immediately, to be followed by detailed engineering and offshore preparatory works performed within the next eight years. HMC’s vessels will remove the platform in a multi-year campaign and transport it to AF Environmental Base Vats, the group’s onshore facility at Vats in Rogaland on Norway’s west coast, for dismantling, recycling, and disposal within the next decade. The spread of activity from surveying through engineering, offshore removal, and onshore recycling is typical of decommissioning projects, which run over many years and across multiple specialist contractors and sites.

“Securing a third contract from this particular client in the last year is a significant achievement and a strong endorsement of our consortium’s capability,” said Lars Myhre Hjelmeset, EVP for offshore at AF Gruppen.

Decommissioning is an established part of the workload in the North Sea, where much of the offshore oil and gas infrastructure was installed decades ago and an increasing number of fields are in late life. Under the UK’s Petroleum Act 1998, offshore operators are legally responsible for decommissioning their installations and pipelines, an obligation that can extend to former licensees, and the North Sea Transition Authority, the UK offshore regulator, expects UK Continental Shelf decommissioning spending to run into the tens of billions of pounds over the coming decades. The combination of ageing assets and firm legal obligations sustains a multi-year pipeline of removal work for contractors such as the AF Offshore Decom–Heerema consortium, which pairs heavy-lift offshore capability with onshore dismantling and recycling capacity at Vats.

Source: Splash247