Premier’s Catcher field gets fourth subsea tree

Dril-Quip, a Houston-based designer and manufacturer of offshore drilling and production equipment, has completed a fourth subsea tree installation on Premier Oil’s Catcher field development, in the UK part of the North Sea.

The company said on Tuesday that the installation was done at a depth of 299 feet. Dril-Quip has been manufacturing subsea and controls for the Premier Oil-operated Catcher field project since the company was awarded the contract back in 2014.

The scope of the deal involves eighteen subsea wellhead systems, eleven subsea production trees, and seven subsea water injection trees.

Also included in this deal are the controls equipment for the trees and manifold and topside mounted subsea equipment for installation on the Catcher Area Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel.

Dril-Quip said it also supplied the installation workover control systems (IWOCS) and completion riser used to install the subsea production systems.

The company added that the first four trees consist of two production and two injection systems, and fill up a 2 x 2 slot template. The trees are shut-in awaiting the installation of a manifold that has a Dril-Quip Subsea Controls Module on it. When the manifold is installed and the flowline hooked up to an FPSO, the first of the subsea wellhead systems will be placed online.

The Catcher field project is operated by Premier Oil with Cairn Energy, MOL Group and Dyas UK Limited as partners.

Premier Oil said in May this year that the Catcher project was on schedule to deliver its first oil in the second half of 2017.

The company also stated that the FPSO delivery for the project is ‘on track’ with the sail-away date of the FPSO from Singapore for a 2017 field start up still on track, despite reported delays in 2015.