Giant heavy lift vessel removes North Sea platform for Ithaca

Oil and gas company Ithaca Energy has started decommissioning operations at a field located in the UK sector of the North Sea, using a giant heavy lift vessel.

In an update on Tuesday, Ithaca Energy said that its decommissioning team was busy at the Jacky field located 19km east of Scotland’s Moray Firth Caithness coast.

Jacky is a low GOR Oil reservoir lying in block 12/21c of the UK sector of the Central North Sea and was proven by the drilling and testing of the 12/21c-6 appraisal well in May 2007. The field was developed using a normally unattended installation (NUI) positioned over the well locations with a topsides production tree and production manifold in 40m water depth.

The decommissioning programme for the Jacky field facilities was submitted in March 2018 and approved in October of the same year. The plug and abandonment of the three wells on the Jacky wellhead platform was completed from a jack-up rig prior to the offshore removal of the wellhead platform.

According to Ithaca, this week, the unmanned wellhead platform was removed in two parts from the seabed via a heavy lift vessel for transportation to the Netherlands for dismantling and recycling.

Under a contract awarded back in December 2019, the platform was removed using the Heerema Marine Contractors-owned heavy lift vessel Thialf, the company’s second-largest semi-submersible crane vessel (SSCV) after Sleipnir.

Both of these vessels were used last month to remove the Brae Bravo platform in the North Sea for TAQA. Before that, Thialf was employed on an installation job for BP in waters offshore Trinidad and Tobago.

It is worth mentioning here that Heerema was also in charge of installing the Jacky platform back in early 2009. The company’s Hermod vessel was used for the installation.

The production from the Jacky field was exported through an unmanned wellhead platform at Jacky and the subsea pipeline to the nearby Beatrice Area facilities for processing and onward export.

Power to the Jacky wellhead platform and water injection support for the reservoir was provided from Beatrice Alpha through a power cable and water injection pipeline. Production from the Jacky field ceased in 2014 due to declining rates and equipment failures.