Shell’s Curlew FPSO arrives in Dundee for cleaning job ahead of recycling

Augean North Sea Services (ANSS), a subsidiary of Augean, has welcomed the arrival of the Curlew floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel into the Port of Dundee in the UK and with it the start of a major contract supporting Shell in its objective to decommission redundant North Sea infrastructure.

Shell decided to remove the Curlew FPSO and decommission its associated subsea infrastructure and requested cessation of production on the Curlew fields including FPSO facility in January 2016. The company then in 2018 submitted its draft decommissioning program for Curlew to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

Shell received an approval from the UK authorities for its decommissioning plan of the Curlew field facilities in the UK North Sea in March 2019.

Announcing the arrival of the Curlew FPSO on Monday, Augean said it would be fulfilling a contract to provide specialized industrial cleaning and waste management services to Shell for the Curlew FPSO to ensure environmental compliance before the vessel is dismantled and recycled later this year.

For the next couple of months, the Curlew FPSO will be berthed in Forth Ports’ Port of Dundee, where ANSS has developed a major decommissioning and decontamination facility working alongside Forth Ports and other tenants of the Port of Dundee. Over the last 18 months, the ANSS team have been collaborating with Bilfinger Salamis in order to make detailed preparations that will maximize the efficient delivery of the project.

ANSS provides complete waste management services to the oil and gas industry. ANSS has developed a multi-million-pound Decommissioning Center in Dundee that has been operational since 2017.

ANSS Managing Director, Simon Gibb, said: “We expect the Curlew project to be the first in a long line of other similar opportunities. This is good news for us (underpinning our recently upgraded performance expectations for the year) and very good news for Dundee, as it will help the local economy and support a number of jobs both through direct employment as well as throughout the supply chain.”

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