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Forties pipeline repaired after second failure

The shutdown is the second since December, when a piece of granite caused a hairline crack.

The company put a statement out 7 February saying that a feed control valve had closed at its Kineil terminal at 10:20 AM. INEOS restarted the pipeline overnight after fixing the valve. According to the company, automated safety systems functioned normally to close the pipeline system.

Shell told Platts that it had shut down its Shearwater gas and condensate platform in the North Sea because of the issue.

The pipeline was opened in 1975 by BP and is now responsible for transporting oil from 85 fields in the North Sea from 21 companies. The system has a capacity of 575,000 barrels of oil per day and is responsible for transporting almost 40% of the UK’s oil and gas. The oil supplied by system makes up a significant part of the Brent Benchmark, used globally to as a reference for oil prices oil prices.

INEOS bought the system from BP in October 2017. After the first shut down, Tom Crotty, director of INEOS, told Reuters: “We will probably spend more on maintenance than the previous owners, reflecting the fact that this is an older asset.”

INEOS was not immediately available to comment on the specifics of the outage.





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