Wireline Issue 52 Winter 2021

Welcome to Wireline #52

K eeping the lights on and the population warm have been key priorities of Britain’s governments for decades. Nobody wants a repeat of the power cuts of 1970s. There is no reason to suppose that this will change, but perhaps for the first time their ability to run the country at an affordable price is coming into question. There was no shortage of passion coming out of politicians’ COP26 speeches but it did not always seem to be grounded in reality (p28). Phrases such as a “just transition” will come back to bite policy-makers if the poorest are hit hardest by high energy prices. This year’s low wind generation levels offshore have coincided with record and sustained high wholesale gas prices at European and Asian trading hubs. So when it decided not to encourage new storage facilities to replace the Rough field, Westminster took an optimistic view on LNG deliveries to the UK that -- this year at least -- is far from the meagre reality. In this context it is good to see that small and large companies are continuing to invest in energy resources resources at home. IOG and Deltic Energy are both developing fields in the once-prolific Southern North Sea. Deltic even pulled off the feat of finding large farm-in partners to take on the operations. And further north offshore Scotland, Serica has already started delivering gas and condensates from its Columbus field to market – in time for the high price point. This focus on gas production will help to lower the carbon footprint of the UK continental shelf as a whole (p12). The government has however taken some bold decisions regarding the financing of hydrogen projects (p34). Both blue and green will be needed, meaning pipeline gas or offshore production will need to be converted on a very large scale, in a way that protects both buyer and seller. From small clusters, complicated markets and pipeline interconnections may grow. The demands of decarbonisation are also being met through ingenious new approaches upstream. The Net Zero Technology Centre is working with aviation company Flylogix to monitor emissions from installations offshore in a reliable and accurate way – a challenge from all sorts of angles (p16). And as a reminder of the cycle of life, the Brae Bravo platform decommissioning marks the end of a once sizeable player in the long history of UK oil and gas production (p40). Some of the engineers at the birth of the project are now taking it apart and with as much care as it was constructed.

Editorial team, OGUK

Wireline is published by OGUK, the voice of the UK oil and gas industry.

Contributors Jeremy Bowden Bill Phillips

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Cover image Brae Bravo

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4 | w ire lin e | A u t u m n / W in te r 2 02 1 ISSN 2053-5392 (Print), ISSN 2053-5406 (Online)