SUBSEA EXPO 2019 - OGV Interview Paddy Collins from Aubin Group

Hi, so you've been presenting earlier today on innovations, can you tell us a little bit more about that?

We’ve been meeting with people from opportunity northeast, we've been talking about some of the innovations we've been working on for decommissioning. So we're a chemical company but what we do is we develop chemicals as almost like tools to help in the decommissioning process and in the subsea activity process, so we've got technology around; well abandonment and the water shut off, we've got technology for moving objects under water for the subsea decommissioning and we've got technology for cleaning systems and making topsides ready for decommissioning as well. So we've been in a lot of work in that area and that's beginning and we're starting to see some pickup and movement in that area.

And we're here at the OGTC stand, you're working with them at the moment, can you tell us a bit more about that?

We’ve got a number of projects got ongoing with with OGTC, we’ve focused around decommissioning and we've focused also about how we can extend the life of existing fields so we can get a little bit more oil out of them. Part of the managing economic recovery, or maximizing economic recovery, that's the big part of the North Sea these days. So what we're working on the moment is we're looking at, (we've got a number of projects; some of which I can talk about some of which I can't because we've got some intellectual property issues) so a couple of the interesting ones that we're looking at are well abandonment- but also water shut up by literally making a chemical so we pump into the ground because scale up the wells so they don't produce as much water. They don't produce much water that you can get the wells to produce oil longer and you can get more recovery from it. We've been also looking at sort of we've got some technology for picking and cleaning subsea lines at the end of the field, but we’ve got some technology for taking oil and trapped oil out of process systems so that they can be recovered easily without having to do hot tapping which is really expensive and disappointing. One of the things we're really, really excited about is a new technology about called ‘contain’ which is a material that rather than having to clean the facility offshore before you decommission, you come with this stuff you pump in what looks like a foamed gel that fills out the whole space in the process plant allowing you to decommission the process plant, take it back to the beach and clean it on the beach rather than cleaning it off shore. That's going to save everybody a lot of money, it's going to make things a lot safer and a lot easier to handle.

And receiving and increased confidence in the industry at the moment what sort of impact is that having for you and do you think elements like technology and innovation are having an impact?

Well I really hope so because that's what we've been doing for quite a long time, but yeah we've seen a lot of pickup in the last- almost since the new year people have got down and they're starting to do some activities. Not just around decommissioning but also around extending the life of existing wells and getting wells to the shut-in back in to life so we've got a number of proposals we’re going to put into OGTC about getting wells that are shut-in due to engineering issues back into production and we can get some more production and extend the life of the North Sea. The market has definitely improved, if the opportunities that we've been pursuing in the last few months actually come off and we're going to see substantial growth in our business going forward, not just in the North Sea but also internationally.