More work for Petrofac on TotalEnergies’ North Sea CO2 storage project

UK oilfield services provider Petrofac has won a multi-million-dollar front-end-engineering design (FEED) contract with France’s energy giant TotalEnergies for work on a project the latter is developing in the Dutch sector of the North Sea.

The contract for a C02 injection platform entails the decommissioning of topsides and installation of a new repurposed platform connecting to the Aramis CO2 distribution network. A collaboration between TotalEnergies, Shell, Energie Beheer Nederland (EBN), and Gasunie, the Aramis project aims to store CO2 in depleted natural gas fields in the North Sea.

This comes on the heels of the FEED contract awarded to Petrofac covering the design of a 32-inch CO2 trunkline, including onshore, landfall, and offshore sections, paired with the offshore CO distribution hub platform for the Aramis system. 

Petrofac’s Chief Operating Officer, Energy Transition Projects, John Pearson, commented: “This award demonstrates confidence in our abilities to provide vital engineering and project delivery expertise to projects that span the CCS value chain.  This project, associated with the overall Aramis development, is another key component to the Netherlands’ ambitions to capture millions of tonnes of CO2 from industrial emitters in the region. We are immensely proud to be making an important contribution to these ambitions.”

The CO2next project, a planned liquid CO2 terminal in the port of Rotterdam, envisages a connection from the port to depleted gas fields in the North Sea via the Aramis trunkline. Having a launch capacity of approximately 5.4 million tonnes per annum (mtpa), expandable to 15 mtpa, the CO2next project entered the FEED phase, with the contract going to Sener.

A €124 million grant for Aramis was recently approved by the EU’s European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA), while CO2next got €33 million. The grants were awarded under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) for trans-European energy networks.

Late last year, a final investment decision (FID) was made for Prothos, a project meant to have a synergistic relationship with Aramis, also transporting CO2 through the port of Rotterdam to depleted gas fields in the North Sea. 

This joint venture between EBN, Gasunie, and the Port of Rotterdam Authority is set to provide transport and storage services to several companies in the port of Rotterdam, including Air Liquide, Air Products, ExxonMobil, and Shell, that intend to invest in their own capture installations to supply the CO2.