BP has awarded DeepOcean a subsea decommissioning and recycling scope at the Foinaven field, west of Shetland on the UK Continental Shelf.
The work covers equipment recovery from the former Foinaven FPSO location. DeepOcean will remove ten flexible process risers and three dynamic subsea umbilicals from the site.
The company will also recover one static umbilical, buoyancy equipment, riser protection, clamps and other related items connected to the risers.
DeepOcean will handle engineering, project management and offshore execution through its Aberdeen operations in the UK. The offshore work will be performed using a high-specification subsea construction vessel operated by the company.
The Foinaven field was discovered in 1992 and started production in 1997. It lies about 190 km west of the Shetland Islands in the Faroes/Shetland Trough, in water depths of 330 m to 530 m.
Before the Foinaven FPSO left the field in 2021, Foinaven had produced 440 million barrels of oil, twice the volume expected when the field was first developed.
Robin Mawhinney, Executive Vice President for the EMEA region at DeepOcean, said decommissioning is often treated mainly as a cost activity, while DeepOcean sees it as a way to use engineering, technology and commercial flexibility to improve project results and recover value for clients.
The project is the second sale and purchase agreement between BP and DeepOcean for this type of work. It follows decommissioning scopes delivered by DeepOcean for BP at the Don and Miller fields under a similar commercial model.
Øyvind Mikaelsen, Chief Executive Officer of DeepOcean, said the award shows a commercially innovative approach to subsea decommissioning on the UK Continental Shelf. He added that the model used at the Miller and Don fields has created a framework focused on efficiency, cost optimization and operational flexibility.
The BP assignment comes three weeks after DeepOcean secured a subsea contract package from Equinor for multiple fields on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.
