Private Equity, page-10

Good on you, I hope more will follow. This guy just keep going on and on about how FAR is etc. Obviously he is on a mission to depress FAR shares from a financial point of view. And there is another one as well, Habba?

Now for something more interesting. I have made a couple of posts saying that, yes, albeit unlikely, I reckon FAR could actually be an operator on the SNE field. This is not silly speculations but born out of my own more than 30 years in the oil business. I will give an example of a project I know very well, the Phillips Petroleum operated Maureen oil field in the UK sector of the North Sea.

The concept chosen was a steel gravity platform, placed over a subsea template containing up to 21 live wells. Nobody in the whole world had ever done anything like that before. Hence very little experience by the company, or anybody else. The platform concept was proposed by the Italian engineering company Tecnomare, who was selected for the design of the sub structure. The deck structure, called a hideck was proposed and designed by the US co Brown and Root. The deck processing equipment and layout was designed by Worley Engineering, the construction of the substructure at Hunterston, Scotland was done by the US company Chicago Bridge and Iron, the deck structure and equipmentinstallation was done by the French company Doris.

I was selected to be in charge of the design of the 40,000 tonne steel gravity structure in Italy, and I was the only Phillips company man on that particularly crucial part of the whole project. Perhaps another 10 or 15 Phillips guys were based in other project offices or construction sites. The total cost of the project to first oil, including a concrete loading tower and 18 pte drilled wells came to US$ 1.3 bn, and this was 1982, when a billion dollar eas considered a lot of money. The pre drilled wells were quickly tied back to the structure and within two months of installation the platform was producing 90,000 bopd. I think Remember the CAPEX payback was about three years. Then the bottom fell out of the oil price. Sounds familiar.