Heather platform evacuated after oil leak

Martyn Wingrove - Friday 31 October 2008

PERSONNEL were evacuated today from the Petrofac-operated Heather oil production platform in the UK North Sea after an oil leak in the processing module shut down the facility.
 
Petrofac, which runs the Heather platform for Lundin Britain, confirmed that 57 workers were taken by three helicopters to Shetland as remaining staff tackled the oil spill, which happened at 10.30 am this morning. 

Aberdeen Coastguard said there was no fire on board the platform and the evacuation was precautionary. 

The platform, which is 441 km north of Aberdeen, was producing around 20,000 barrels of oil per day from the Heather and nearby Broom field, but output has been shut in, said Petrofac. 

The incident came 30 years after the facility started pumping oil from the northern North Sea, as it commenced operations in October 1978. 

The spill occurred only three days after Petrofac’s chief executive Ayman Asfari warned the industry that some oil platforms in the North Sea were “falling apart”. 

Mr Asfari said the industry must not reduce investment on assets because of the recent fall in oil prices as this could increase the danger of serious incidents. 

“The state of some of these assets that were built in the 1970s - they are falling apart,” said Mr Asfari at a London conference this week. 

“What worries me is that we end up in a situation when these budgets get curtailed and that means one thing – that there will be serious accidents around the corner,” he said. 

Petrofac and Lundin had safety problems a year ago in the North Sea, when a fire broke out on the Thistle platform, resulting in a major facility evacuation involving 90 of the 159 people on board. 

After the fire on Thistle, the British government’s Health and Safety Executive served three notices to platform operator Petrofac, which demanded operation improvements. 

In reaction to Mr Asfari’s comments this week, industry organisation Oil & Gas UK said North Sea operators had invested more than $3bn in keeping these assets safe and reliable in the last three years. 

“This year alone, the industry is spending more than $1.5bn on asset integrity. Our industry is working hard to meet the challenge of maintaining asset integrity for the longer future which lies ahead of us,” said Oil & Gas UK health and safety director Chris Allen. 

The HSE and offshore work unions in the past has been critical of asset integrity and maintenance programmes on North Sea platforms.
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