BP Extends Subsea 7 Contract

The contract, which covers subsea construction services, was announced in January 2006 has been extended from the current two-year term to five years. It will now run through December 31, 2011.

The contract is for the provision of a deepwater construction vessel with its in-house designed and built Hercules deepwater work class ROV systems. The vessel will be permanently employed in a work program supporting the development and maintenance of BP’s deepwater West of Shetland oil and gas fields. It will undertake a wide variety of construction tasks as well as inspection, repair, and maintenance (IRM) activities. The offshore program is supported by a dedicated onshore project management and project engineering team with added specialist knowledge of remote intervention activities in harsh environmental areas.

Although the primary scope will be for work in the West of Shetland basin on the Schiehallion and Foinaven fields, the vessel may be deployed to other BP assets and fields as needed.

At water depths reaching 500 meters, the Schiehallion and Foinaven developments are the deepest oil and gas producing fields in the UK continental shelf to date. With their prevailing environmental conditions, they present a challenging frontier for performing remote intervention construction and IRM activities.

Subsea 7 has been performing construction and IRM activities for BP in the West of Shetland basin since the initial development of the Foinaven field in the early 1990s. More than 100 Subsea 7 personnel, both onshore and offshore, will provide these services for BP.

"We are delighted that BP has put its confidence in Subsea 7 as their West of Shetland construction operator for a further five years," said Steve Wisely, Subsea 7's UK vice president. "This gives us the opportunity to build on the continuity of services providing our technical knowledge and experience over the extended period of this contract."