Plexus Secures Purchase Order for POS-SET Connector

Plexus Holdings secured a purchase order to supply and rent its new product POS-SET Connector™ utilising POS-GRIP friction grip engineering, to be used by Centrica Energy Exploration and Production for abandonment operations on a gas well originally drilled 32 years ago in 1982 offshore Holland.

This represents Plexus’ first purchase order secured for the lucrative abandonment market, which the Directors believe has significant growth potential as a large number of ageing wells reach the end of their life in the North Sea and other regions and could become an important new revenue stream for the Company. The total value of the contract including engineering and testing work undertaken by Plexus is estimated at £0.8 million. Revenues are expected to start in March 2015, the company informed.

The proprietary POS-SET Connector has been developed and qualified to enable operators to re-establish a connection onto rough conductor casing that has been previously cut above the seabed to facilitate abandonment operations.  Full scale testing has shown that the Plexus connector can achieve 80% of the bending and tensile strength of the parent pipe. The POS-SET product can also be used on a number of applications in addition to abandonment including subsea completion operations using Subsea Tie Back Wellhead and Surface Wellhead Tie Back Platform Completion, Plexus said.

The POS-SET Connector was initially developed and tested for Wintershall Holland. The purchase order with Centrica will be the first time the equipment will be installed out in the field in an abandonment application. Centrica will utilise a Plexus POS-SET Connector which has been designed specifically to be compatible with the 30 x 0.5″ conductor originally used to drill the well and which has since been cut off above the seabed.

Plexus CEO Ben van Bilderbeek said, “This latest order with Centrica represents another major milestone for Plexus, as it sees us enter a new and growing abandonment market where regulation is increasingly focused on the best available equipment solutions. According to the DECC, out of the plus 11,000 wells that have been drilled offshore UK, 5,000 remain active. These wells along with those in other parts of the North Sea, and around the world will have to be abandoned in a responsible manner once they have reached the end of their lives.  With regulatory scrutiny on decommissioning and abandonment practices on the rise, we are confident that POS-SET offers operators similar performance, safety and cost benefits that our core POS-GRIP wellhead equipment has delivered on over 350 wells drilled worldwide.  As a result, we believe this contract with Centrica has the potential to be the first of many and that POS-SET is well placed to secure a large share of this growing market.

“It has always been our strategy to first prove the superiority of our POS-GRIP friction grip method of engineering based equipment in the most extreme operating environments, and having established Plexus as the dominant supplier in the HP/HT market in the North Sea, we have done just that.  Our next objective is to build on this proven capability and expand both geographically and in terms of applications for our game changing POS-GRIP technology. POS-SET is the latest member of the POS-GRIP family of equipment to enter the market but it will not be the last. With the Tie-Back Connector and the Subsea JIP both at advanced stages of development, this is an exciting time as we continue to   pursue our strategy of building Plexus into a leading oil and gas engineering company offering best in class equipment and services around the world. In anticipation of further such exciting product developments over the coming years, and as we begin to utilise the significant design and development engineering skills that we have harvested as part of our HGSS subsea JIP, we have recently incorporated a new subsidiary – Plexus Applied Technologies Limited.”