The 382-metre Pioneering Spirit, the world’s largest offshore construction vessel, arrived at Lerwick Harbour on the morning of Saturday 22 August carrying the 16,000-tonne topside of TAQA’s North Cormorant platform, the largest decommissioning project the port has received to date. The topside was transferred to a barge for delivery to the Dales Voe decommissioning base, where dismantling and recycling by Brown & Mason Group and Peterson Energies is expected to last 18 months.
North Cormorant served as a manned drilling and production facility in the East Shetland Basin for 42 years, producing 467 million barrels of oil between February 1982 and cessation of production in June 2024, with export via the Brent pipeline to the Sullom Voe terminal. Pioneering Spirit began transporting the topside from the North Cormorant field, about 110 nautical miles northeast of Lerwick, shortly before 8pm on Friday 21 August, reaching Lerwick around 12 hours later.
Pioneering Spirit is operated by Allseas and is capable of removing platform topsides up to 60,000 tonnes and jackets up to 20,000 tonnes in single-lift operations, with a 5,000-tonne crane. The vessel is 382 metres (1,253ft) long and 124 metres (407ft) wide.
Brown & Mason Group is employing about 30 people on the dismantling project and told the BBC it expects to recycle up to 97% of the steel and materials on board.
Colin Nicolson, deputy chairman of Lerwick Port Authority, worked on North Cormorant earlier in his career. He told the BBC: “I had eight good years on there and met many good people and made lifelong friends on there. One of my tasks was gas testing. There’s very few places I haven’t been on board, including the top of the drilling derrick and the tip of the flare stack.”
Nicolson said seeing the platform arrive at Lerwick for dismantling was “tinged with a wee bit of sadness, old memories it brings with that. But also quite a rewarding thing to see Lerwick Port has once again got a significant piece of decommissioning work.”
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Lerwick Port Authority told Shetland News the project showcased the collaboration between Brown & Mason and Peterson at the port and further strengthened its growing track record in offshore decommissioning.
The North Cormorant work forms part of a wider TAQA contract awarded to Allseas covering four platform topsides and three supporting jackets in the Northern North Sea, with topsides removals planned between 2026 and 2028 and completion expected by 2029.
