Serica Energy Restarts Triton FPSO Production
January 7, 2025
U.K.-based oil firm Serica Energy has resumed production at Triton floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) unit in the North Sea, following the outage caused by a technical issue.
Serica Energy said the production into the Triton FPSO resumed on December 27, 2024, with a phased restart of the producing and new wells ongoing.
Following extensive root cause analysis and remedial work, the export gas compressor was restarted successfully and gas exports commenced on December 29, the company informed.
The process of restarting Triton was at the longer end of expectations communicated earlier, and the company also experienced a short period of unscheduled downtime on the Bruce platform related primarily to a subsea intervention to ensure enhanced production reliability on the Rhum field.
According to Serica Energy, these factors contributed for its annual 2024 production to average at 34,600 boepd across the year.
As of January 5, 2025, overall production net to Serica totalled 46,400 boepd.
“With the planned phased restart of the Triton fields, we expect this rate to increase, ramping up to full run-rate production as all wells, including new production from the Gannet GE05 well, are brought online.
“The resumption of operations with two-compressors at Triton, which the Company has not seen since the first quarter of 2024, remains on schedule to be achieved in the first quarter of 2025,” the company said.
Drilling and completion operations and requisite steps for hook-up on the next well in the campaign, EC1 on the Guillemot North West field, have now concluded, with similarly positive initial data to that seen on the B6 and GE05 wells, it added.
The EC1 well is expected to enter production in the first quarter of 2025. The COSL Innovator rig is now set to move to commence drilling operations on EV02 on the Evelyn field, the next potentially high-impact well, with first production expected in the second quarter of 2025.
“Production in the second half of 2024 was clearly disappointing and well below the potential of our asset base. We and our partners are working to improve planning and procedures to optimize maintenance and maximize production resilience going forward.
“At Triton the key issue has been operating vulnerabilities associated with reliance on a single gas export compressor, and we have stayed in touch closely with the FPSO operator as they worked through root cause analysis in relation to the repeated issues seen in the second half of 2024.
“We understand what has caused these issues and, together with our partners, are implementing improvements to support better and more reliable future performance. As the Triton operations continue their ramp-up, we look forward to seeing both enhanced production as the new wells drilled during 2024 contribute fully, and more resilient operations, as we resume operations with two compressors in the first quarter,” said Chris Cox, Serica's CEO.
