Culzean: Behind-The-Scenes of an Unprecedented Offshore Facility

Culzean, a Showcase for TotalEnergies’ Operational Excellence

Jean-Luc Guiziou, Senior Vice President Europe, Exploration & Production at TotalEnergies: TotalEnergies in the UK has a long history, which started here back in the 1960s. Concerning E&P, we are today the largest operator: 40% of domestic gas is operated by TotalEnergies. This represents roughly 18% of the overall demand in the country. Throughout our history, we have put on stream flagship projects, and more recently, in 2019, our Culzean project, which is today the largest producing field in the UK, with about 120,000 barrels of oil equivalent/day.

Jérôme Arnaud, Offshore Installation Manager, Culzean Platform at TotalEnergies E&P UK Ltd: The Culzean project was fairly complex. It's an ultra-high-pressure well site. The first objective was to ramp up the production of the platform by putting new wells in production. Once the platform was started and then reliable, it could produce 500 million cubic feet of gas on a daily basis. The main objective then was to increase further this level of production with what is called the de-bottlenecking project. We made several technical modifications around the glycol contactor and the piping. We tried to tackle some vibration issues caused by an increased velocity in the pipes. We achieved successfully the 550 million cubic feet of gas on a daily basis back in March 2022.

Jean-Lu Guiziou: We have been able to increase by 10% the capacity of Culzean. It was very welcome, this year in particular, with the high demand in gas in the country and in Europe. Culzean from the beginning was designed to capture the latest technologies, in particular, digital. It’s one of the jewels in our portfolio here.

Laura Aldren, Digital & Data manager at TotalEnergies E&P UK Ltd: 3 years ago, TEPUK was chosen to be the digital asset flagship. To remain competitive, we need to modernize the ways of working. A brilliant example that we've got offshore, on the Culzean platform, is our suite of mobility tools. We're moving towards a completely paperless maintenance, but we also recently introduced E-Permit, which means that the permit-to-work system can be mainly managed from the device. No more paper, and a much more streamlined and monitorable system.