Another production outage at North Sea field

Spanish oil and gas company Repsol has been forced once again to temporarily shut down its Yme field located in the North Sea offshore Norway due to technical issues.

The Yme field was discovered in 1987 located in Block 9/2 and 9/5 in the Egersund Basin, approximately 130 km from the Norwegian coastline. Repsol’s subsidiary, Repsol Norge, is the operator of the field and its partners are Lotos Exploration and Production, KUFPEC Norway, and OKEA.

Following damage to parts of the process pipe system at the Yme field, Repsol Norge last Friday informed OKEA that the technical issues would likely result in a total of five to six weeks of production downtime at the field during the third quarter of 2022 as repair work is being conducted.

According to OKEA’s statement, the estimated restart of production is in early October. The reduced production in the third quarter of 2022 will not result in any change to OKEA’s production guidance for the year.

Following the first oil in October 2021, the production from Yme was planned to ramp up to plateau production during 3Q 2022. However, the field has been experiencing some issues due to which the production has been shut down several times since the start-up.

Namely, less than a month after the first oil, the field was shut in to “assess the high oil in water readings” and it remained shut until the problem was rectified.

Later, in April 2022, the field was shut in following the detection of a minor oil spill. The source of the leak was identified in a pipe between the wellhead platform and the subsea storage tank. Starting at the beginning of May, Yme produced directly to a large tanker vessel, Bodil Knudsen, to allow for the issue to be fixed.

Later this year, Lime Petroleum, a Norwegian subsidiary of Singapore’s Rex International, is expected to take over KUFPEC Norway’s interest in the Yme field following a deal from August 2022.