Total Restarts Elgin/Franklin Production

Total has today announced that it has restarted production on the Elgin/Franklin fields in the U.K. North Sea almost a year after it was forced to shut production down.

Production was halted at the site and more than 230 staff were evacuated when a leak was discovered on March 25th last year. The source of the leak was subsequently found to have been caused by a "unique" combination of stress corrosion and rock compaction.

The announcement by Total today follows a decision by the U.K. Health and Safety Executive last Wednesday to approve the field to restart production.

In a statement today, Total said that it gradually planned to bring the fields up to a production level of 70,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, about 50 per cent of the area's production capacity. Additionally, the company plans to redevelop the area. A plan to drilling new infill wells on the Elgin and Franklin is currently being studied. The company said the new wells will aim to bring production on the field back to pre-leak amounts by 2015.

The company also said that it had learned lessons from the incident that it planned to share,

"Managing this industrial incident securely for our personnel and with limited impact on the environment was our priority," Yves-Louis Darricarrère, President of Total Upstream, said. "The causes of the incident are now known and all necessary measures have been taken to enable us to resume production and carry out future exploitation of the fields from the Elgin/Franklin area in the best safety conditions.

"Lessons learnt have been shared with the UK authorities and will also be shared with the wider industry. We now focus on continuing our development plans to bring back the full potential from these fields the soonest possible."