London — The Total-operated Culzean gas field in the UK North Sea suffered a new unplanned outage late Monday, with the field's production capacity reduced by more than half as a result.
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Register NowCulzean -- which only started production on June 11 -- has been hit by a number of technical problems since it began operations.
According to a REMIT note Tuesday, Culzean's production capacity has been cut to 58 GWh (5 million cu m) for Tuesday, down from its current technical daily capacity of 130 GWh (12 million cu m).
The outage began at 2230 local time Monday and is expected to be resolved by 0600 Wednesday, according to the note.
There was no explanation for the outage, but it followed a previous issue on August 1 that was only resolved on August 8 after several restart attempts.
PLATEAU PRODUCTION
Culzean is one of the UK's biggest producing fields and is expected to ramp up to plateau production of 14 million cu m/d.
At those rates, Culzean is capable of meeting between 5% and 10% of UK gas demand.
The duration of plateau production could be limited, however, at around two to five years, depending on the reservoir behavior.
The high pressure, high temperature field was discovered in 2008, with reserves estimated at 1.3-1.5 Tcf (37-43 Bcm).
Total has a 49.99% stake in the $4.3 billion project, with BP holding 32% and JX Nippon 18.01%.
-- Stuart Elliott, Stuart.Elliott@spglobal.com
-- Edited by James Burgess, james.burgess@spglobal.com