I spent the season on board as a shift supervisor on Perenco’s Southern North Sea well decommissioning campaign, working out of Lowestoft. With no EPC construction team in the middle, I worked as the direct offshore interface to Perenco, hands on with vessel management, deck crews and contractors. Aurora Media Hub was filming throughout. This is a supervisor’s read, not a brochure.
Start with the people who run it. Perenco held and managed the whole campaign, and that is the part outsiders underrate. Decommissioning is not one job, it is a sequence of them, each with its own spread of equipment, contractors and weather windows to line up. That lean setup, coordination running straight between the operator and the offshore team, only works when the scopes are planned well and the people on deck are trusted to run them. Perenco planned the scopes, mobilised the kit and kept the campaign moving across fields including Trent and Leman Southwest, wells drilled decades ago, the Leman field dating to the late 1960s and its platforms to the 1980s. Putting an old field to bed properly and handing that stretch of seabed back cleaner is quiet, unglamorous work, and it takes an operator that can project manage the lot without drama. They did.
That work runs through Lowestoft, the most easterly port in Britain and one of the tightest entrances on the East Coast. Everything in or out passes the traffic signals on the South Pier and works to Lowestoft Harbour Control on VHF 14, on a short tidal window and open to the North Sea swell. The port is also on the way up. Associated British Ports opened the Lowestoft Eastern Energy Facility in early 2025, and ScottishPower Renewables and RWE now run offshore wind operations from the PowerPark. Oil and gas, decommissioning and offshore wind share the same quay. We ran interim mobilisations there between scopes, moving equipment on and off the deck for the next phase.
The deck belonged to the MSV Kingsborg. She started life as a platform supply vessel, and Wagenborg rebuilt her into a subsea support and construction vessel, with a dedicated accommodation module and a 50 tonne active heave compensated crane fitted for the campaign. She is the only vessel of her kind in the Wagenborg fleet, the one set up to carry a crane and work subsea rather than only supply a platform. On paper that is a conversion. On deck she is a different vessel depending on the day, moving cargo on one mobilisation and holding station over a wellhead with an ROV in the water the next. A vessel that can reconfigure between roles without losing days is worth real money in a campaign like this.
Station keeping in weather is the least visible part of offshore work and the part that decides whether the day happens at all.
The test was winter. Constant one to two metre swell, strong currents and a short tidal picture, and the Kingsborg holding position steady enough to keep an ROV working and people over the side. On deck that meant running lifts, severance sequences and SIMOPS to a tight line, exclusion zones and environmental controls held through the weather, and the coordination running constantly between deck and bridge. She held, and that is down to the crew as much as the steel. The Wagenborg crew handled the reconfigurations, the deck and the dynamic positioning without fuss, which is about the highest compliment you can pay an offshore team.
Claxton Engineering did the sharp end. Their tooling ran the cutting and recovery: the Diamond Wire Saw, the Internal Multi-String Cutter, the Packer Lift Tool and the Drill-and-Pin Reaction Can, working through conductors, casing strings and legacy wells in support of permanent plug and abandonment. It is precise work, measured in millimetres and unforgiving of a moving deck, which brings the whole thing back to stability. None of the cutting happens unless the vessel above holds still and the campaign around it is run tight.
That is why we filmed it. A client that managed a hard campaign well, a port quietly rebuilding itself around energy, a supply vessel converted to earn her keep, and a crew that made the conversion pay off. Vessels and campaigns like this rarely get a proper record made of them while they are working. They should.