The silence of the lambs26 May 2019 21:50
It’s a bank holiday weekend and McAdder has taken over from Seadog to deliver repeats of RNS material and industry reports. Each to there own to defend their investment into this new world of gas as the transition to a low carbon world. No problem with that. Can I add my own view?
There is a remarkable silence from Castlefield House which many have commented on, and there is a plausible explanation for this silence on the GTW initiative.
Back in August 2018, Conoco Philips shut down the Theddlethorpe gas terminal, so ending gas production from a cluster of gas fields in the southern North Sea and requiring their decommissioning. Faroe Petroleum got caught up in this with their Schooner and Ketch fields, which were productive but depended on Theddlethorpe as an export route. We all know this from the public domain.
Faroe was prematurely pushed into decommissioning S&K, and they embarked on a decom plan. It was something that Faroe really could not afford and that was public knowledge too. Along came MFDevCo with a proposal to defer decom costs by a GTW project to tie into the Hornsea wind farm. Brilliant idea! Faroe bought into it and maybe even offered MFD some cash to come up with a plan.
This stroke of genius was the rumoured curved ball. It was explained to Last Throw and other insiders at the November lunch in the Liberal Club in London hosted my AM. Somehow the insiders had to blurt it out and they did. Very quickly we had LOIs with Siemens and Marnavi to deliver it.
The next curve ball was the hostile takeover of Faroe by DNO in January 2019, who made a big deal out of saying Faroe could not afford to decom S&K. Once DNO was in charge, they eventually committed to decom S&K because they can afford it and they have bigger fish to fry than GTW.
Then in May 2019, we hear from the trade press ”Faroe has hired the high-spec Ensco 100 for a nine-well P&A programme in the UK” . S&K is the only decom programme they have, so that is the end of the story from the Liberal Club. It seems MFDevCo is in denial if reports from Faroe are true, that feasibility studies are arriving after the decom drilling rig contract has been awarded.
Yes, there we are, and there will be other opportunities, but I believe this one has gone down the pan IMO