UK's Serica Energy restarts production at Triton vessel

(Reuters) - UK's Serica Energy said on Tuesday that its Triton floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel in the North Sea resumed production on Dec. 27, with a phased restart of the producing and new wells ongoing.

It said its 2024 annual production averaged 34,600 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd), slightly below its previous forecast of 35,000 to 36,000 boepd.

"Production in the second half of 2024 was clearly disappointing and well below the potential of our asset base," Chris Cox, Serica's CEO, said in a statement.

Serica had reported a problem with a single gas compressor in the FPSO vessel in late October. At the time, it said the company's total output would be slightly below 41,000-46,000 boepd in 2024.

"At Triton the key issue has been operating vulnerabilities associated with reliance on a single gas export compressor, and we have stayed in touch closely with the FPSO operator as they worked through root cause analysis in relation to the repeated issues seen in H2 2024," Cox said.

The company said that the process of restarting Triton took longer than expected, with Serica also seeing a short period of unscheduled downtime at the Bruce oil and gas platform in the North Sea.

The resumption of operations with two compressors at Triton, which the company has not seen since the first quarter of 2024, remains on schedule to be achieved in the first quarter of 2025, Serica said.

(Reporting by Arunima Kumar in Bengaluru; Editing by Sonia Cheema)