Serica Hires Rig for North Sea Rhum Intervention

London-listed Serica Energy reported on May 12 it had entered a contract to hire a drilling rig for intervention work at a well at the Rhum gas field in the North Sea.

The WilPhoenix semi-submersible, provided by Norway's Awilco Drilling, is due to begin the work at the Rhum-3 well in the fourth quarter of 2020 and complete it within 70 days. The programme involves recovering debris left in the well by the previous operator and removing an obstruction believed to be in place across parts of the downhole completion.

Rhum-3 will be recompleted once the work is finished and brought on stream. It is already connected to subsea production infrastructure.

Serica operates the producing Bruce, Erskine, Keith and Rhum fields, and several other projects under development. At Rhum it is partnered with the National Iranian Oil Co. The UK company produced 30,000 boe/d of oil and gas in 2019, up 13%.

Serica had hoped to achieve additional growth this year by launching Rhum-3 in the second half, but signalled in April that the well may not start up until 2021 and might hit constraints with processing capacity at the Bruce platform.

Serica also suffered a setback earlier this year when it was forced to halt production for over a month at the Bruce platform, which receives all gas from Bruce, Keith and Rhum, after a damaged caisson was identified. It has also pushed back the start of its Columbus field development into next year.