Combined services

Claxton, an Acteon company, the leading supplier of engineering and services for shallow-water, jackup-depth markets, has been awarded a contract to riglessly casing cut and recover a total of seven wells in the Southern North Sea across two of the operator’s, normally unmanned, platforms, along with an additional subsea suspended well at one of the locations.

The first NUI scope of work includes the removal of Christmas trees in preparation for the removal of the production tubing, wellhead preparation in readiness to also undertake the sub-mudline multi conductor/ casing cutting and recovery, and severance and conductor recovery of the suspended subsea well. Due to limited deck space, work will be conducted as a combined operation using a jack up lift barge ‘JULB’ and without the use of a drilling rig.

Laura Claxton, MD, Claxton, explained: “We will be using a 150te hydraulic proving jack package, Claxton Double Drilling Units (DDUs) for drilling and pinning and rapid cut bandsaws for cutting the combined multi strings. Marine growth stripping and removal using our purpose designed tooling will also be delivered, along with multi-string severance using our proprietary abrasive water jet cutting system SABRE™.

“We have also provided an engineered and aligned solution to reduce the number of slewing operations required by the JULB crane with a revision to our existing tubing laydown frame by incorporating a travelling bogie system. The frame and bogie eliminates the need for the crane to slew from the well centre while still allowing tubing to be laid out on deck. This saves valuable time on a project.”