The multi-national oil and gas company also said that the remaining platform, Brent Charlie, would follow suit “in the next few years.” In late 2011 another platform, Brent Delta, was the first to be decommissioned and this marked the beginning of the retirement of the giant oilfield. Shell said in a statement that “from a technically innovative installation phase through to a long period of operation and production, these platforms have helped to sustain vital North Sea oil and gas supplies. We will now focus on safely decommissioning these assets.”
It’s an enormous project, as Alex Kemp, professor of petroleum economics at the University of Aberdeen, explains: “The Brent field decommissioning will be the biggest of all the fields in the UK sector in terms of scale and the amount of money to be spend… The total decommissioning costs will be £4 billion in today’s prices… The sizes of the platforms mean that you can’t be quite sure just how things will work out, even though they’ve been planning it for at least two years.”
The Brent field is situated in the East Shetland Basin – just over a hundred miles north-east of the Shetland Islands. It was discovered in 1971 and production started-up in Brent in November 1976, where oil and gas was exploited on the four platforms in the following four decades. The platforms were among the first in the North Sea to produce oil.
The field was only expected to last for about 25 years, but the discovery of significant amounts of natural gas in mid-1990s helped prolong its output until now. Shell said both Brent Alpha and Brent Bravo had “significantly exceeded” their original expected lifespans.
Peak oil production from Brent was in 1984 – when over half a million barrels were produced each day.
Professor Alex Kemp says that “it was one of the early giants… Of the early generation of fields Brent is the biggest in terms of combined reserves of oil and gas… It was certainly a pioneer.” But he says that “oil and gas will continue beyond 2050 [and] we think it will continue at low levels beyond 2060… But the old giant fields are on their way down, a few will last quite a long time.”
Oil and gas reserves in the North Sea appear to be running out – and since 2007 the UK has explored the possibility of exploiting onshore shale gas through fracking. In the United States, the output from hydraulic fracking now makes up 43 percent of oil production and 67 percent of natural gas production.
John Scrimgeour spent 35 years in the energy industry before becoming director of the Institute of Energy at the University of Aberdeen. He insists that indigenous production needs to be maintained to drive British economic growth:
“We don’t have to produce [oil and gas] indigenously, but, of course it’s not good for your balance of payments if you don’t. If you think historically, large supplies of cheap energy drive economic growth and if you can supply that yourself you’re so much the better.”
The decommissioning of these Brent field platforms will take years to complete. It may well mark the beginning of the end for North Sea oil and gas exploitation. Over the coming decades it will become clear whether the UK finds an alternative to replace this once bountiful source of energy.
Makati1 on Sat, 1st Nov 2014 9:40 am
Lack of investors/suckers will end the age of petroleum along with the lack of ‘consumers’ that can afford it’s products. I suspect the crash will be loud enough to hear on the moon.
Northwest Resident on Sat, 1st Nov 2014 10:49 am
Britain is most definitely in need of “large supplies of cheap energy” to drive economic growth, just like everybody else. Problem is, there aren’t any more large supplies of cheap energy, not with so many buyers competing for a dwindling supply. They won’t get cheap and plentiful energy from fracking, that’s for sure.
rockman on Sat, 1st Nov 2014 2:02 pm
“…there aren’t any more large supplies of cheap energy”. Once we get past the latest production surge thanks to higher oil prices we won’t be have large supplies of expensive energy either. Not there won’t be some grease left to hunt for unless enough consumers can afford even higher prices.
dolanbaker on Sat, 1st Nov 2014 2:12 pm
North sea exploration isn’t over yet, here’s a recent discovery (very light on facts though) http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-29739085
I’m guessing that all that’s left now is the stuff that geologists put to the back of the cabinet as “not worth looking at”. Now that all the better prospects have been taken, they are worth looking at.
Norm on Sat, 1st Nov 2014 2:29 pm
This article can’t be true. Cornucopians said the oil will never run out. They dont need to shut down those platforms, they could keep pumping forever.
shortonoil on Sat, 1st Nov 2014 5:58 pm
Expect a lot of similar reports over the next few years. Robelius predicted that the giants would go off their plateau in the late late teens, and our research verifies his conclusion. With oil prices having hit their maximum, petroleum producers now have a new paradigm to work with. Instead of reserves, reserves, reserves they now have to regard the lowest cost production sources as optimal. This will completely change the face of the industry.
The mega projects are going, and gone, and only smaller, low cost, and highly efficient projects will remain. Big Oil is going to be pared down to scrawny, lean and mean oil. It will soon become obvious to all that our dependance on oil has become our Achilles heal.
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/
Makati1 on Sat, 1st Nov 2014 9:08 pm
Definitely scraping under the North Sea barrel. I just hope they are not stupid enough to frak all of their surviving farmland. We shall see.
rockman on Sat, 1st Nov 2014 9:32 pm
Donlan – “”Now that all the better prospects have been taken, they are worth looking at.” Nope. They only get pulled out if there’s new data indicating a higher probability of success or if oil/NG increase enough to make them economical.
But there are times when some companies do drill prospects that aren’t worth looking at but they’re all the have in their inventory. This phase unusually immediately precedes bankruptcy. I have worked for more than one company that drilled wells they knew had very little chance of success. But they figured they were going belly up if the didn’t drill something. I’ve seen as many managers fired for not drilling enough as those let go because of too many dry holes.
Texas Engineer on Mon, 3rd Nov 2014 7:41 am
Decommissioning could destroy one of the common magical thinking arguments. “We will get a lot more oil from our old fields from EOR”. Hard to do that when the field is kaput.
Mike LaBonte on Mon, 3rd Nov 2014 9:31 am
I can’t find production history data for the individual Brent platforms, but I would love to know what production rate each one ends at, and plot that against oil prices at the dates of closing. If there is a pattern it might tell us more about the break-even price for that type of mature off-shore operation, more than the conflicting claims we get from analysts.