About Beatrice

The Beatrice field lies approximately 22 kilometres from the Scottish coastline in the outer Moray Firth (Block 11/30a of the Central North Sea), some 90 kilometres north east of Inverness.  

About the facilities

The Beatrice facilities consist of:

• The bridge-linked Alpha Drilling (AD) and Alpha Production (AP) platforms
• The Bravo (B) production platform and interlinked conductor support structure (CCS) which is a normally unmanned installation
• The Charlie (C) small wellhead platform
• Two demonstrator wind turbines (ownership shared with SSE)
• An import power cable from Dunbeath (fully trenched and buried)
• Pipelines (fully trenched and buried) including those within the field and the 76 kilometres main export pipeline which transports oil from Beatrice Alpha to the Nigg Oil Terminal 

Facilities to be decommissioned

Since the Ministry of Defence has withdrawn from the original agreement to reuse the Beatrice facilities for military training purposes in the post-production phase, the decommissioning programme which was approved by DECC (now BEIS) in 2004 now needs to be amended to include:

• Removal of the five platform structures
• Removal of the two demonstrator wind turbines, founded on steel jackets.  There is no potential for their incorporation into either of the two wind farms being proposed for the outer Moray Firth
• Decommissioning of 142 kilometres of buried pipeline, including 59 kilometres of non-operational pipeline, the method for which will be determined via a comparative assessment of options
• Decommissioning of the import power cable from Dunbeath to the Alpha Production platform, plus in-field power cables between Alpha Production, Bravo platforms and the wind turbines (all cables are buried), also to be subject to comparative assessment
• Plugging and abandoning of all 43 platform wells

Ithaca Energy is responsible for the decommissioning of their Jacky platform and the related pipelines tied into the Beatrice field.