MBIE Tui ROV Survey

Why choose us? We offered a complete package: a high quality subsea equipment suite; decades of subsea experience; and a highly skilled team available to take on the task!

Perfectly placed

In its day the Tui oil field – located 50 kilometres off the coast of Taranaki – was the sixth-largest crude oil field in New Zealand. It started production in 2007, but in 2019 its permit operator went into receivership, leaving the Government to decommission the field’s eight wells and the associated subsea infrastructure.

One of its first steps was to identify the scale of the task, with the aim of ensuring a safe and environmentally responsible decommissioning process that would protect and preserve the local marine environment. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment was appointed to lead the project, and after a tendering process it appointed Seaworks to undertake a ‘general visual inspection’ of multiple locations in the field, and at each one to take video recordings, seabed samples and water samples.

Seaworks offered a purpose-specific, integrated solution: a Quasar 6 ROV operating from the DPI Seaworker – a 31-metre-long ROV and support vessel that would be manned by a six-member ROV/survey team and seven marine crew.
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The job kept our inspection engineer and data technicians busy as they processed and reported on the data, and the conditions were difficult owing to turbulence in the relatively shallow water. However, the team succeeded in providing high quality general visual inspections, and we later returned to the site to undertake a multibeam-echo sounder survey to support the decommission project.

At the time of writing our involvement is complete, but the $300 million project continues in the hands of international contractors with specialist expertise in oil field decommissioning. We’re following the programme with interest, and are very pleased to have made a contribution to this important project.