Pelagic Environmental Subsea Control Fluid Gets First Australian Contract

Pelagic 100 subsea control fluid has been chosen by PTTEP Australasia as the subsea control fluid for the Montara development in the Timor Sea, offshore Darwin.

This decision has prompted the manufacturer Niche Products to create a new company division (Niche Products Australia Pty Ltd.) with manufacturing facilities in Perth and extensive storage facilities in Darwin. This will be the 3rd subsidiary company worldwide for Niche Products, the others including Niche Products LLC in USA and Niche Products AS in Norway.

Pelagic 100 is widely used in the North Sea and has an OCNS Class E environmental profile, which is the best environmental category possible under UK legislation. This marks a significant improvement over the majority of fluids currently discharged in Australian waters. It is expected, as environmental legislation becomes stricter around the world, more operators will turn to more environmentally acceptable fluids.

Tom McKechnie, Technical Director at Niche Products said ‘this is a major breakthrough and will pave the way for other local Operators to consider the use of Pelagic 100 in their subsea systems. We are confident that PTTEP’s choice of this fluid, given its environmental profile combined with 10 year field experience, will yield excellent results over the operational field life of the Montara development. We look forward to continuing dialogue with other Operators in the region to demonstrate the environmental and technical benefits of converting subsea systems to Pelagic 100’.

Niche Products specialise in the offshore industry and have been supplying environmental fluids since the company was founded in 2001. The Pelagic range includes environmental fluids for production, drilling and umbilical storage.

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Press Release, July 22, 2013