For a time, following the initial development of the North Sea fields in the 1960s, the UK derived massive incomes from exporting gas. Now, though, the gas has started to flow the other way as production declines and consumption increases. Either way the future of Shell’s onshore processing and transmission site at Bacton, Norfolk, is secure
By John O'Hanlon
Natural gas is the UK’s largest source of primary energy, supplying over 40 percent of the country’s total energy needs. It is used both as a domestic and industrial fuel, as well as for generating electricity, to provide heat and power for our homes and industries, and as feedstock for chemicals, pharmaceuticals and other products.
The UK is currently the world’s fourth largest producer of natural gas and has more than 200 offshore fields in production around Great Britain, which are fed into the Bacton terminal via three pipelines. The longest brings in gas from the eastern Sean field via a 107 kilometre, 30 inch pipe; the Sole Pit Offshore Transportation System (SPOTS) is a 24 inch, 72 kilometre pipeline which transports gas from the Clipper field; and the shortest is a 56 kilometre, 30 inch pipe from the Leman West System. It was in 1968 that the Leman field started delivering gas to the newly commissioned Bacton plant.
Don Paulino wasn’t around then, but he has been Plant Installation Manager here, in charge of a 160-strong team and for the smooth running of this strategically vital, 24/7 operation, for a couple of months now, and has worked for Shell for over 13 years.
Sales quality
The gas that is piped in from the seabed cannot be sent direct to the consumer. It is full of impurities, water and the like, and much of the plant is involved with removing and processing these impurities, drying it out, and ensuring that it is of ‘sales quality’ before it is exported to Transco (UK national grid), the UK’s national gas supplier or the Interconnector pipeline, which was opened in 1998 to export gas from the UK sector of the North Sea to the Continent and is now being adapted at a cost of £150 million to allow it to import more gas..
“All of the gas from the Southern North Sea is what we call a ‘wet’ gas,” says Don Paulino, “which means that it contains condensate and natural gas hydrocarbons. Our first task is to separate out the condensate, which is a low-density mixture of hydrocarbon liquids.”
This is a two stage process, involving ‘dewpointing’. The gas is then heated and delivered straight to the grid. However the condensate has to be stabilized and put through further processes to remove any remaining gas. After that it is sent to Petrochem Carless Refinery for processing and turns it into special products, mainly for the automotive industry.
Further processes remove glycol, water and salt from the gas. Glycol is introduced to the pipelines for the same reason we put it in our windscreen washers – to prevent freezing, or ‘hydration’ of the wet gas in the pipeline. The recovered glycol is reintroduced to the pipes.
Total reliability
Running the Bacton plant is an object lesson in high reliability management, and that is the main challenge, explains Don Paulino.
The plant is nearly 40 years old, however and some of the equipment, though still basically reliable, is more difficult to maintain because spares are getting harder to source, he says... “ The challenge is how to sustain and optimise the current assets in the longer term,” he says, “ we have a programme of planned maintenance and replacement as part of the Shell Total Reliability programme. Parts of the system are shut down in small chunks, when demand is lower. The Total Reliability programme was a highly successful initiative as proven in our experience at AERA in the USA.”
Training for tomorrow
However the reliability of the process depends to an even greater extent on the abilities and attitudes of the people who run it than on the equipment. The lack of skills is a real threat to the industry as a whole, stresses Paulino.
This is a strategic challenge going forward, he continues. It’s not just a matter of skills training for the existing staff, but of succession planning to ensure that the skills that have been built up over the years are not lost. There’s a family atmosphere at the plant, fostered not doubt by its comparative geographical remoteness and the high security culture that permeates it, but also very much as part of Shell’s corporate goal of developing HR solutions across the industry. So there is a ‘buddy’ system whereby new employees are placed under the wing of experience people who know Shell, know Bacton, and know the oil business. These resources are there, but they are finite, as was demonstrated recently when one of the site’s best mentors, a man with 37 years’ service at Bacton, retired.
The East of England Skills for Energy Research Report published in 2005 stressed the need to maintain the reliability of energy supplies through innovation and adaptation, entrepreneurship and access to markets; to up-skill and enlarge the energy labour pool in order to improve productivity and competitiveness; to sustain economic growth by maximising returns on the export of industry expertise; and finally to work towards reducing the industry’s carbon footprint. It set out the findings of IFF Research’s commission to determine the make up of skills and the issues arising for the energy sector in the East of England.
All this activity is carried out under the umbrella of the East of England Energy Group (EEEGR), in which Shell is an active participant. The region has a cluster of energy businesses including nuclear power at Sizewell, wind farms, CHP, and now a biofuels project at British Sugar, Wissington. The region will “… continue to play a vital role in the supply of energy to the whole of the UK… but we must act now to develop the human resources needed to sustain and grow the energy industry in the East of England over the next ten year,” said the report.
The need to import
After the reliability and human resource challenges, the third is more about opportunities than threats. “I want to make sure that Bacton is the facility of first choice as the UK becomes a net importer of gas, and we have to look for more overseas source,” says Don Paulino. On 1 December last year, the 230-kilometre long Balgzand-Bacton Line (BBL) - the first pipeline to link the Netherlands and the United Kingdom - began supplying gas from the Dutch mainland to the Shell facility at Bacton. With a capacity of 1.75 million cubic metres per hour, this £300 million undersea pipeline is able to transport approximately 15 billion cubic metres of gas per year.
The BBL gas is of sales quality, says Don Paulino. No need to process it to any great extent – Bacton’s role is simply to monitor its quality and ensure that it is at the right temperature to ship it onward into the grid.
To secure the long-term future of the plant it has to be run at world-class efficiency, and Shell regularly leverages on technology to ensure longer-term sustainability and efficiency of its operations. One of the most visible and ubiquitous programmes is the gradual replacement of all the metal clad pipe insulation – there are miles of aboveground pipes there – with non-metallic cladding. After many years the flexible metal cladding lets in water and the pipes can corrode – the new material is still flexible, but impervious, and will extend the life of the asset as well as cutting inspection and maintenance.