Overview

Hydro Group plc specialise in the design and manufacture of subsea and harsh environment electrical and optical connectors, penetrators, cable assemblies and terminations for the oil and gas industry. With many years experience, Hydro Group plc is seen as a market leader in providing solutions for oil and gas industry subsea applications. Hydro Group plc is at the forefront in the development of subsea technologies, with involvement from prototype concept through to design, manufacture and project management. Hydro Group plc and its business streams Hydro Bond Ltd and Hydro Cable Ltd supply the complete package, including umbilical cables, electrical and optical connection systems for data, power and signal transmission.

Hydro Group plc holds the certification approval to ISO 9001:2008 to design and manufacture subsea electrical and optical connectors, electrical pressure hull penetrators, associated subsea electrical cable terminations, installation of electrical and optical connectors, specialist underwater and harsh environment electrical and optical composite cables, tethers and umbilical’s.

Hydro Group plc has participated in a huge number of high profile oil & gas industry projects. Our customer portfolio includes all major subsea contractors and operators in both domestic and international markets.

INTERESTING READING: Oil and Gas Industry

North Sea oil is a mixture of hydrocarbons, comprising liquid oil and natural gas, produced from oil reservoirs beneath the North Sea.

In the oil industry, the term "North Sea" often includes areas such as the Norwegian Sea and the area known as "West of Shetland", "the Atlantic Frontier" or "the Atlantic Margin" that is not geographically part of the North Sea.

Brent crude is still used today as a standard benchmark for pricing oil, although the contract now refers to a blend of oils from fields in the northern North Sea.

HISTORY: 1964 to Present

The UK Continental Shelf Act came into force in May 1964. Seismic exploration and the first well followed later that year. It and a second well on the Mid North Sea High were dry, as the Rotliegendes was absent, but BP's Sea Gem rig struck gas in the West Sole field in September 1965. The celebrations were short-lived because the Sea Gem sank with the loss of 13 lives after part of the rig collapsed as it was moved away from the discovery well. Larger gas finds followed in 1966 - Leman Bank, Indefatigable and Hewett, but by 1968 companies had lost interest in further exploration of the British sector, a result of a ban on gas exports and low prices offered by the only buyer, British Gas. West Sole came onstream in May 1967. Licensing regulations for Dutch waters were not finalised until 1967.

The situation was transformed in December 1969, when Phillips Petroleum discovered oil in Chalk of Danian age at Ekofisk, in Norwegian waters in the central North Sea. The same month, Amoco discovered the Montrose field about 217 km (135 mi) east of Aberdeen. BP had been awarded several licences in the area in the second licensing round late in 1965, but had been reluctant to work on them. The discovery of Ekofisk prompted them to drill what turned out to be a dry hole in May 1970, followed by the discovery of the giant Forties oilfield in October 1970. The following year, Shell Expro discovered the giant Brent oilfield in the northern North Sea east of Shetland in Scotland. Oil production started from the Argyll field in June 1975 followed by Forties in November of that year.

A 'Statfjord' Gravity base structure under construction in Norway. Almost all of the structure was submerged.
Volatile weather conditions in Europe's North Sea have made drilling particularly hazardous, claiming many lives. The conditions also make extraction a costly process; by the 1980s, costs for developing new methods and technologies to make the process both efficient and safe, far exceeded NASA's budget to land a man on the moon. The exploration of the North Sea has been a story of continually pushing the edges of the technology of exploitation (in terms of what can be produced) and later the technologies of discovery and evaluation (2-D seismic, followed by 3-D and 4-D seismic; sub-salt seismic; immersive display and analysis suites and supercomputing to handle the flood of computation required).

The largest field discovered in the past 25 years is Buzzard also located off Scotland , found in June 2001 with producible reserves of almost 64×106 m³ (400m bbl) and an average output of 28 600 m³ to 30 200 m³ (180,000-190,000 bbl) per day. Most if not all of the UK oil fields are located in or just beside Scottish waters.

Reserves and Production

The British and Norwegian sections hold most of the remainder of the large oil reserves. It is estimated that the Norwegian section alone contains 54% of the sea's oil reserves and 45% of its gas reserves. More than half of the North Sea oil reserves have been extracted, according to official sources in both Norway and the UK. For Norway, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate gives a figure of 4,601 million cubic metres of oil (corresponding to 29 billion barrels) for the Norwegian North Sea alone (excluding smaller reserves in Norwegian Sea and Barents Sea) ultimate of which 2,778 cubic metres (60%) has already been produced prior to January 2007. UK sources give a range of estimates of reserve, but even using the most optimistic "maximum" estimate of ultimate recovery, 76% had been recovered at end 2010. Note the UK figure includes fields which are not in the North Sea (onshore, West of Shetland).

United Kingdom Continental Shelf production was 137 million tonnes of oil and 105 billion m³ of gas in 1999. (1 tonne of crude oil converts to 7.5 barrels. The Danish explorations of Cenozoic stratigraphy, undertaken in the 1990s, showed petroleum rich reserves in the northern Danish sector, especially the Central Graben area. The Dutch area of the North Sea followed through with onshore and offshore gas exploration, and well creation.

Exact figures are debatable, because methods of estimating reserves vary and it is often difficult to forecast future discoveries.

Peaking in 1999, production of North Sea oil was nearly 950 000 m³ (6 million barrels) per day. Natural gas production was nearly 280×109 m³ (10 trillion cubic feet) in 2001 and continues to increase, although British gas production is in sharp decline.

UK oil production has seen two peaks, in the mid 1980s and late 1990s, with a decline to around 300×103 m³ (1.9 million barrels) per day in the early 1990s. Monthly oil production peaked at 13.5×106 m³ (84.9 million barrels) in January 1985 although the highest annual production was seen in 1999, with offshore oil production in that year of 407×106 m³ (2559 million barrels) and had declined to 231×106 m³ (1452 million barrels) in 2007. This was the largest decrease of any other oil exporting nation in the world, and has led to Britain becoming a net importer of crude for the first time in decades, as recognized by the energy policy of the United Kingdom. The production is expected to fall to one-third of its peak by 2020.