Supporting Decommissioning and Abandonment Specialists In The North Sea and Further Afield
Pipeline and platform abandonment projects often produce vast quantities of contaminated wastewater. Pigging fouled or polluted subsea pipelines also produces significant quantities of semi-solid sludge that has to be treated in line with exacting environmental regulations like the OSPAR convention or the UK’s Conservation of Offshore Marine Habitats and Species Regulations 2017.
As anyone managing a plug or abandonment project will know, shipping wastewater and contaminated sludge to onshore treatment facilities is costly and time consuming, which is why we provide an alternative service that allows you to clean and treat contaminated waste in situ – using scalable filtration units to remove unwanted contaminants and ready your waste streams for disposal at source.
Pipeline Decommissioning Projects
While decommissioning subsea pipe, heavily contaminated pipelines can prove problematic for operators and service companies focused on safety and cost.
Residual solids - including deposited hydrocarbons, and scale - have to be removed before these pipelines can be abandoned, and the process of flushing or pigging lines often produces several hundred tonnes of contaminated wastewater.
Given the significant costs associated with the daily operating and management of a fully-fledged decommissioning project, this contaminated water needs to be treated as efficiently as possible.
Most suppliers are forced to ship their wet waste to onshore treatment facilities, but there is a more efficient and cost-effective alternative.
Equipped with over 30 years of wastewater treatment experience, we’re ideally placed to help you treat and purify contaminated sea water at source – eliminating the need for expensive off-site disposal and ensuring full legislative and regulatory compliance.
Scalable Filtration and Wastewater Treatment Technology
We use our own SepSORB® filtration vessels to remove dissolved hydrocarbons, scale and harmful chemical residues from seawater that’s been used to flush disused or retired pipelines; eliminating unwanted contaminants and bringing oil in water levels down below 5ppm in a single pass.
SepSORB® units are efficient, effective and highly-scalable. They can be run in- series or parallel to clean large amounts of water in a short space of time and we also have the capability to add pre-screening modules to setups that need to cope with significant volumes of heavily contaminated wastewater.
More importantly, we can deploy the personnel and equipment needed to set up and run a filtration system in a matter of days, allowing you to rapidly treat large volumes of contaminated seawater in situ – without compromising on your deadlines.
For specialists dealing with vast amounts of wastewater, we’ve also developed a large SepSORB® 4000 filtration unit that can filter up to 40 m3 of contaminated water per hour. As with our regular SepSORB® vessels, these units can be run in parallel to create a filter system that can rapidly process huge volumes of contaminated water in a matter of hours.
Case study
Plug & Abandonment
Hydrocarbon contaminated fluid was cleaned through the SepSORB® filter vessels and discharged overboard, well below our target 20ppm (OSPAR guidelines maximum 30ppm).
Offshore Platform Plug and Abandonment
Plug and abandonment projects also produce large amounts of contaminated wastewater. Decommissioned structures have to be thoroughly cleaned in accordance with environmental legislation like the UK Petroleum Act 1998, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s Act 29 and the OSPAR convention.
Residual waste streams also need to be processed before structures can be abandoned in accordance with the relevant industry regulations and we are well placed to help you resolve both of these problems in situ.
We have a dedicated solids control division that specialise in the effective treatment of semi-liquid sludges and slurries; using decanter centrifuges to separate solids and release liquids that can then be treated and returned to the sea.
This cuts down on the amount of semi-liquid waste you’ll need to return to on-shore cleaning facilities and ensures full compliance with any relevant legislation.
Our SepSORB® filtration and industrial wastewater treatment systems can also be deployed to treat and purify cleaning water or slops from drains and reservoirs.
End-To-End Support For Decommissioning Projects
Here at Separo, we pride ourselves on providing a turnkey solution to your filtration problems. Rather than just shipping filter units out to your site, we’ll work with you to understand how much water you’re processing, what sort of contaminants you’ll be dealing with and what kind of setup you’ll need to hit your targets.
Once we know exactly what you need, we’ll deliver everything from the units and any spare media, right through to the hoses and fittings you’ll need to get everything running. We also provide our own trained filter specialists to set up your vessels and show your staff how everything works.
When working on decommissioning and abandonment projects, we understand that speed, efficiency and technical know-how are of prime importance.
We provide experienced personnel and field-proven equipment to ensure that your targets are met. We’ll also work closely with your team to ensure that any roadblocks are overcome in a timely manner. We have the hands-on knowledge and expertise needed to scale your filtration system up or down according to the demands of your project.
