Brent (oil field)

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Location of the Brent oil field in the North Sea

Brent is an oil field located about 180 km northeast of the Shetland Islands in the British sector of the North Sea . Oil production in this field began in 1975. The field is known for the oil type Brent Crude, which is used as a price reference, as well as for the floating oil tank Brent Spar , which was occupied by Greenpeace activists in 1995 before its planned sinking .

Shell UK Ltd. owns 50% of the oil field . and from Esso Exploration and Production UK . With a total production of 320 million m 3 since 1975, it is the second most productive oil field in Great Britain.

Location, geology and name

The Brent oil field is located in map quadrant UK211 / 29 near the border with the Norwegian sector, in which the well-known Statfjord and Gullfaks fields are located. It is counted in the East Shetland Basin eligible region. The North Sea is approx. 142 m deep at the site of extraction. The deposits are in turn 2651 m below the sea floor in a fault formation , which creates a connection to the oil-bearing layers in the Kimmeridge clay .

The field name refers to the Brent Goose (ger .: Brant or Brent Goose ). Shell has usually named its oil fields with alphabetically consecutive names of sea birds, e.g. B. Auk , Brent , Cormorant , Dunlin and Eider .

history

Brent Bravo and Brent Alpha production platforms

The field was discovered in 1971. The first drilling platform to be built in 1975 was Brent Bravo in the Condeep system. In the following years, three more platforms (Brent A or Alpha, Brent Charlie, Brent Delta) were built. The Brent Spar storage tank and the Brent Flare system for flaring were also added . In 1979 a pipeline was built to the oil terminal in Sullom Voe , which connects not only the Brent field but also other fields with the coast. In 1994, the Brent Spar went out of service and was dismantled in Norway from 1998 onwards, after being prevented from sinking by massive public protests. Brent Flare was decommissioned and transported away in 2005. In addition, massive £ 1.3 billion renovation work took place on the drilling rigs in the 1990s  to keep the field running well beyond 2010 by producing natural gas . The natural gas is transported to St Fergus through the FLAGS ( Far North Liquids and Associated Gas System ) pipeline .

production

Production in the field began in November 1976 and reached its maximum oil production in 1984 with 24,799,028 m 3 . Before the renovation in the 1990s, production fell briefly to 4,395,831 m 3 in 1990 , but then increased again to a maximum of 13,705,132 m 3 . Oil production has been declining more and more since the mid-1990s. In 2012 it was only 59,749 m 3 . So the Brent oil field is largely exploited.

Shutdown

  • December 2011: Brent Delta
  • November 2014: Brent Alpha and Brent Bravo

At the beginning of February 2015, the oil production company published plans to scrap the Brent Delta platform, which has been shut down for three years, by means of a specially rented ship, the Pioneering Spirit . A scrapping period of ten years is planned for the remaining platforms alpha, bravo and charlie. After that, nothing more than the base (base construction on which the topside rests) will remain in the North Sea from what was once the most important North Sea offshore oil field in Europe.

  • April 28, 2017: Allseas put a video online on Youtube showing the dismantling of the topsides of the Delta platform in great detail.
  • August 21, 2019: Shell put a video online on Youtube in which the dismantling of the topsides of the Bravo platform is described in great detail.
  • September 04, 2019: Germany has vetoed British plans to allow Shell to leave the base in place. There are still large amounts of crude oil in these Condeep bases and from a German perspective there is a risk of an environmental disaster if these concrete structures rot and the oil ends up in the North Sea. Several other European countries have adopted this point of view.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ UK Annual Oil Production (M3) . UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) website. Retrieved July 10, 2012.
  2. ↑ http://theoildrum.com/story/2006/9/8/11274/83638
  3. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from April 30, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Shell Info: "AT A GLANCE: BRENT OIL AND GAS FIELD"; accessed on April 29, 2018 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.shell.de
  4. ↑ Pioneering Spirit removing the Brent Delta topsides HD on YouTube , May 30, 2017
  5. ↑ 'There We Go' - Lifting 25,000 tonnes in 9 seconds on YouTube , from August 21, 2019
  6. ↑ joe: North Sea: Great Britain and Germany argue over oil rigs. In: Spiegel Online . September 4, 2019, accessed May 15, 2020 .

Web links

Coordinates: 60 ° 54 ′ 0 ″  N , 1 ° 48 ′ 0 ″  E