Monday, May 06, 2013
By Ben Winkley
LONDON--The Brent Pipeline System may have to close temporarily at times during months of repair work at a key North Sea oil platform, the system's operator said Monday.
The system, which transports 100,000 barrels a day of the benchmark crude oil from North Sea fields to the export terminal at Sullom Voe, in the Shetland Islands, may be subject to temporary closure on a precautionary basis during repair work at the Cormorant Alpha platform, said TAQA Bratani, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi National Energy Co. (TAQA.AD).
The platform, which has been shut twice this year after leaks, is the conduit for the Brent Pipeline System.
TAQA said it has accelerated a long-term inspection, repair and maintenance program at Cormorant Alpha, but that this will take months to complete and, although no closure of the pipeline is planned as part of this it has been and could be subject to temporary closure on a precautionary basis.
Outages at the 10,000-barrels-a-day Cormorant Alpha have several knock-on effects. Oil from 27 fields flows through the platform, and Total SA's (TOT) St. Fergus natural-gas terminal, north of Aberdeen, which delivers an average 21% of the gas used in the U.K. each day, sometimes cannot operate due to the issues further up the production chain.
An outage in the Brent pipeline generally cuts off supplies of as much as an eighth of all the crude that makes up the so-called BFOE, a blend of the four major North Sea crude-oil grades: Brent, Forties, Oseberg and Ekofisk. The BFOE blend is among those that can be delivered against the Brent oil-futures contract on the IntercontinentalExchange.
Write to Ben Winkley at ben.winkley@dowjones.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
06-05-13 0730GMT
