Pioneering Spirit Lifts North Cormorant Topsides for Dales Voe Demolition

Lerwick Port Authority has issued a notice to mariners closing Dales Voe to other traffic for ten days, while Allseas' Pioneering Spirit lifts the North Cormorant platform and sets it down on the barge Iron Lady for the short passage to the quayside.

Once the structure is ashore, demolition is expected to take 12 to 14 months. The contractor handling the recycling work, Brown and Mason Group, expects around 97 percent of the material to be recovered, and says 25 to 30 people will work on the project, many of them local.

The restrictions are specific. Dales Voe itself, taking in the headlands of Fora Ness and Kirkabister Ness, is off limits, and a 500-metre separation applies around any vessel working into or out of the area. A listening watch on VHF 12 is requested, along with a call to Lerwick Port Control before passing close by.

North Cormorant has been a manned drilling and production platform in the East Shetland Basin for more than four decades. The field was discovered in May 1974, the platform was installed in 1981, and production began in February 1982. Over a 42-year life it produced 467 million barrels of oil, all of it routed through the Sullom Voe Terminal.

The removal method is what makes the notice necessary. Pioneering Spirit takes topsides off in a single lift rather than cutting them into modules offshore, which compresses months of piece-small work into one operation but requires a large exclusion zone around it and around the receiving barge. The same characteristic is why Dales Voe has become the site for this class of work in the first place: it is one of the few UK locations with the water depth and quay strength to take a full topside ashore intact.

For Shetland, the economics of decommissioning are now a recognisable part of the local industrial base rather than a one-off. The platforms that came out of the East Shetland Basin in the early 1980s are reaching the end of their lives in sequence, and each one arrives as a defined multi-year contract with a defined workforce attached.