The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Decom project for North Sea veteran
An oil industry veteran who has played a key role in corralling private funding for the V&A Dundee, has invested in a new business venture.
Serial entrepreneur Alasdair Locke, who since 2011 has spearheaded private fundraising for the city’s design museum and who earlier this year pledged £1 million of his own cash to the project, is among a group of investors backing new decom firm Well-Safe Solutions.
In addition to the Abbot Group founder, ex-Nautronix chief executive Mark Patterson and former senior Talisman and ConocoPhillips executive Paul Warwick are on board.
The north-east-based firm hopes to eventually create up to 400 jobs as it becomes a key player in the fledgling decom market.
Well-Safe is targeting work from the plugging and abandonment of wells that have been drilled in the UK Continental Shelf during almost 50 years of exploration.
Ensuring spent wells are safe is a major headache for oil firms and the work will account for a major proportion of total decommissioning costs.
Well-Safe is looking into acquiring its own rig to carry out operations and hopes to secure its first contract within two years.
Mr Patterson, executive director at Well-Safe, said owning a rig meant the company would be able to make sure the vessels were not diverted to other jobs.
“With this certainty over availability, we can secure long-term commitments from operators and have full control over scheduling of long-term well P&A campaigns,” Mr Patterson said.
The incorporation of Well–Safe comes as a wave of North Sea decom contracts have been signed by major operators.
The profile of the sector was raised earlier this year when Shell brought in the world’s largest construction vessel, the Pioneering Spirit, to lift away the topsides of the Brent Delta platform and transport it to Teeside for recycling.
Decommissioning is expected to generate work worth tens of billions in the North Sea alone in the coming decades. A new task force, Dundeecom, has recently been established to attract significant decommissioning works to the Port of Dundee.