Fairfield Energy to decommission North Sea oil platform

Posted on 11 May 2015 by Victoria Fitzgerald

Fairfield Energy has revealed plans to decommission its North Sea platform Dunlin Alpha, in a move that will cost £400m.

Work from all Dunlin cluster fields will cease operations in mid-June before the shut-down process.

Representatives have said that Dunlin Alpha will continue to be “fully manned and operational”, exporting third-party oil into the Brent pipeline until that point.

Oil field drilling
The decommissioning has been blamed on challenging conditions and the fall in oil prices.

The move has been attributed to challenging conditions and the fall in oil prices.

The oil field is located 300 miles north-east of Aberdeen, only a few miles from the Norway boundary line.

Originally operated by Shell, the Dunlin field started production in the late summer of 1978, until it was taken over by Fairfield in 2008.

At its peak, the site produced 120,000 barrels of oil per day.