Apache North Sea has awarded Well-Safe Solutions a multi-year contract to decommission the Forties Field platform wells and subsea wells in the central UK North Sea.
The scope represents the largest decommissioning program awarded in the North Sea to date, Well-Safe said, with an estimated contract value of more than $1 billion.
bp was the original developer of Forties in the 1970s.
Work will start this year and is set to continue into the mid-2030s. Well-Safe Solutions will be the lead contractor for all well-related project management, well and subsurface engineering activity, and offshore delivery of platform/subsea wells.
The company said the contract would safeguard hundreds of jobs in Aberdeen, offsetting in part the losses caused by the dearth of exploration drilling and new field developments in the UK sector.
Well-Safe has a specialist decommissioning fleet of three former drilling rigs (two semisubs, one jackup).
In the UK, the company noted the declining availability in recent years of mobile offshore drilling units capable of drilling and decommissioning both platform and subsea wells. It counts only five semisubs remaining for work on the UK Continental Shelf.
This is despite the requirement for thousands of UK wells to be decommissioned by the end of the decade.
