Laggan Tormore: When a Project Comes to Fruition

Today, I’m taking a few minutes to pause and remind myself and my team of the part we all played in one of the UK’s biggest and most complex gas field projects.

For the last few years, the UK oil & gas industry has been pinning much of its hopes on the potential of the technically challenging fields to the west of the Shetland Islands. Nearly one fifth of the UK's remaining oil & gas reserves are thought to lie in this area. However, the complexities of deep water, the cold choppy Atlantic and an area of environmental sensitivity make this area particularly challenging to develop.

The Laggan Tormore (or Laggan and Tormore) field development project, which has its unveiling ceremony yesterday, tackled these challenges head on.  The UK’s biggest construction project since the Olympic park, it includes development of the two fields and construction of a gas processing plant and export pipeline.  This is the first time that gas had been successfully recovered from the West of Shetland area and it is expected to meet a massive 8 per cent of the UK’s gas demand, or two million households, making it key to the country’s energy security.

The compression modules we developed for this site are integral to ensuring the gas gets from the deep wells, across the challenging ocean to the customer.  Because of this, it was vital they provide the resilience and reliability needed for a site as remote, technically complex and important as this. GE Oil & Gas developed three modules; each is a complete compression train with a compact and powerful PGT25+ gas turbine driving two BCL centrifugal compressors. The three fully assembled and tested modules—plus external auxiliaries and waste heat recovery systems—were shipped in January 2013. It was an impressive and memorable sight to see over 1,000 tonnes of equipment leave our Avenza construction yard in Italy and be shipped across to the West of Shetland.

But how soon we move on.  Often, given the time lag between our work and start-up of a site we forget to mark the moment that all our hard work truly comes to fruition, and the impact that it has not only on our customers, but also on their customers and the wider economy. Yesterday at the ribbon cutting inauguration event, my team paused to reflect and celebrate.