Cairn Energy chooses Vysus Group for field development surveys offshore Senegal

Cairn Energy PLC, one of Europe's leading independent oil and gas exploration and development companies, has chosen Vysus Group to provide project management and technical assistance in their extensive SNE field development surveys offshore Senegal.

The contract will use Vysus Group's specialist geophysical and geotechnical expertise in a site investigation campaign that will use two vessels to survey and investigate an area of more than 400 square kilometres in the Sangomar Offshore and Sangomar Deep Offshore licence blocks. Offshore operations are expected to take place between June and September 2017.

Chris Burnside, Cairn Energy PLC, SNE Exploitation Manager, says: “Cairn and its Joint Venture partners, Woodside Energy and FAR Ltd and Petrosen, the national oil company of Senegal, are determined to ensure a safe, efficient and technically productive field development survey and site investigation campaign and Vysus Group will help us to achieve these objectives.”

The geophysical, shallow geotechnical and environmental site survey will assist the planning and engineering of the facilities needed to develop the field. Vysus Group will ensure optimum information on seabed and sub-seabed conditions are provided to enable the safe, secure and efficient design and installation of facilities, identify and investigate the relevant seabed areas and shallow soil zones; and assess the location for the presence of potentially important seabed habitats. Its specialist teams will also cover the geotechnical site investigation to help Cairn develop suitable arrangements for their subsea production system, from drill centres connected via flowlines and umbilicals, to Floating Production, Storage and Offloading facility (FPSO), and provide information relating to an export pipeline route to shore.

Richard Orren, Vice-President of Survey and GeoEngineering at Vysus Group, says: “We are delighted that Cairn Energy has decided to continue their association with Vysus Group. The award of this contract builds upon and reinforces our long and successful collaboration with Cairn.”

“It’s an exciting project to be involved in and at such a critical time in the industry. It will bring together considerable expertise from our specialist teams across Vysus Group and we look forward to playing our part in supporting Cairn and their partners on their field development programme in Senegal.”

Vysus Group has provided support to Cairn over the past two years for their SNE field development. This includes a metocean study, a regional geo-hazard assessment desk study, a seabed and shallow soils ground model, and a continental shelf regional study for export pipeline routes. The company has also been instrumental in providing Cairn with assistance on evaluating the technical capability of survey contractors and tender responses prior to selection of the contractor for the survey and site investigation campaign.

Vysus Group’s Well Engineering team are also supporting Cairn and their partners in the significant multi-well appraisal drilling campaign off Senegal, with the provision of staff and services.

Cairn has been active in Senegal since 2013 and drilled two wells in 2014, discovering oil in both and opening a new hydrocarbon basin on the Atlantic Margin, with the SNE-1 discovery recognised as the largest global oil discovery in 2014. These were the first wells to be drilled offshore Senegal in more than 20 years and the first deep-water wells.

In 2015 the Government of Senegal approved Cairn and its Joint Venture partners’ extensive evaluation plan with Cairn going on to drill four further appraisal and exploration wells in the SNE field in the first half of 2016.