Total restarts Elgin production

Paris - Total has restarted production in the Elgin/Franklin area, having gained approval for the move from the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Production had been stopped since 25 March 2012 due to a gas leak on the company’s G4 well.

Output has resumed gradually and should soon reach close to 70,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boed) – 50% of the production potential from the fields, Total said.

The company is now studying a redevelopment project to recover the production level which existed before the Elgin incident by 2015. This would involve drilling new infill wells on Elgin and Franklin.

Meanwhile, the company said its West Franklin Phase II development project remains ongoing with production start-up scheduled for 2014.

“The causes of the incident are now known and all necessary measures have been taken to enable us to resume production and carry out future exploitation of the fields from the Elgin/Franklin area in the best safety conditions,” said said Yves-Louis Darricarrère, president of Total Upstream.

“Lessons learnt have been shared with the UK authorities and will also be shared with the wider industry<” he added. “We now focus on continuing our development plans to bring back the full potential from these fields the soonest possible.”

Production from the Elgin/Franklin area, which includes the Elgin, Franklin, West Franklin and Glenelg fields, totalled over 700 millions of barrels of oil equivalent (Mboe) by the end of 2012. The remaining reserves are in excess of 500 Mboe and were not impacted by the Elgin incident.

An investigation led by Total revealed that the leak was caused by a type of stress corrosion which was unique to the G4 well and was fed from a non-producing chalk layer located about 1,000 meters above the original reservoir. The conclusions have led to a number of wells being earmarked to be permanently abandoned.

The Elgin closure impacted on companies throughout the supply chain, as evidenced by INEOS Group whose 2012 results were adversely affected by the loss of feedstock from the North Sea gas field.

The closure forced the business to utilise more expensive imported feedstocks for the gas cracker in Grangemouth. This impacted the results by €45 million in 2012, INEOS reported.