Centrica is to close its Rough storage facility. The company confirmed that trying to eke out more life from the ageing facility is uneconomic.
Rough, past its design life, has been in decline for some time, with longstanding technical issues. Centrica stopped injections at the facility last summer while it undertook more testing and said last April that there would be no further injections in storage year 2017/18.
In a statement today, Centrica Storage Limited (CSL) said:
“CSL has now completed the wells testing programme and has analysed the results of this extensive programme. CSL has also completed a review into the feasibility of returning Rough to injection and storage operations and concluded that, as a result of the high operating pressures involved, and the fact that the wells and facilities are at the end of their design life and have suffered a number of different failure modes while testing, CSL cannot safely return the assets and facilities to injection and storage operations.
“Furthermore, from a commercial perspective, an assessment of both the economics of seasonal storage today, and the costs of refurbishment or rebuilding the facility and replacing the wells, suggests that both pathways would not be economic.
“As a consequence, CSL intends to make all relevant applications to permanently end Rough’s status as a storage facility, and to produce all recoverable cushion gas from the field, which is estimated at 183 billion cubic feet.”
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