Offshore Decomissioning Services Inverness

Inverness Waste Management handles storage and disposal of liquids from big offshore decommissioning jobs and following challenges posed by mercury contamination.

At this time we were oblivious of the challenges we were about to face. The gas field, located in the UK Southern gas basin, discontinued production in 2005 along with the decommissioning programme is running over a number of years.

But we arranged for the gas condensate and waters to be pumped from the vessel into a storage facility whilst we affirmed the information supplied by first samples of the material. During this procedure it was affirmed that mercury was present at low levels in the stuff. Exceptionally receptive to our customers desires, we managed to organise a filtering operation that was conducted onsite to filter and remove the mercury from the material. After evaluating the environmental gains for our customer, we could dispose of the stuff locally just 10 miles away from the storage facility as an outcome of the filtration procedure. The stuff would have had to been disposed of much further afield at much greater cost in the event the filtration operation did not occur on site.

After months of facing numerous challenges, the operation was completed successfully with no injuries or incidents during the process. We accommodated and met our customer’s environmental considerations during the endeavor by disposing of the waste as local as possible. Additionally, we could return the storage facilities in the exact same state as we discovered them removing all traces of contamination. After defeating the endeavor, Graham Heaton our Bid & Marketing Manager who’d been involved in the job said, “this was the largest bundle of waste that we have disposed of at Inverness Waste Management which presented major challenges but the presence of mercury made this one of our largest challenges however”.