Qualla: Pickerill and Juliet Gas Fields

Pickerill and Juliet Gas Fields: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On a clear day the Pickerill platforms were a smudge on the eastern horizon from the Lincolnshire coast, visible only as a thin line of steel and the occasional helicopter beat. Today, even that is gone. The Pickerill A and B platforms, and the smaller Juliet field that tied back to them, were demolished with the kind of completeness that the modern North Sea demands: jackets cut, topsides shipped to scrap, wells plugged with cement, every structure above the seabed removed. What's left is a stretch of ordinary-looking sea, a few subsea markers, and the faintly archaeological pleasure of knowing exactly what used to be here.

Pickerill and Juliet Gas Fields: The Discovery, by Number

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Drillers do not name fields when they find them; they label them with their well numbers, and the names come later. The Pickerill field's identity began in December 1984 as well 48/11b-4, a successful test through dark Lower Permian sandstone known as the Rotliegend - the great g...

Pickerill and Juliet Gas Fields: Two Platforms, No Crew

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

ARCO built Pickerill A and Pickerill B as the southern North Sea liked them - unattended. Helicopters dropped technicians in for inspection rounds, but no one slept aboard. The platforms were stripped-down by design: gas from the wellheads ran through a production manifold to the...

Pickerill and Juliet Gas Fields: The Juliet Footnote

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Juliet came later and quieter. The field was discovered to the southeast and developed by Perenco - which had bought the Pickerill operations from ARCO in 2004 - as a tieback to the existing Pickerill infrastructure. Production started in 2014. It lasted four years. By 2018 the m...

Pickerill and Juliet Gas Fields: Decommissioning, North Sea Style

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Pickerill platforms came down with the same precision they had been built. Topsides were cut off and shipped to disposal yards. Jackets were severed below the seabed line. Wells were plugged and abandoned with cement, the operation documented in hundreds of pages of regulator...

Pickerill and Juliet Gas Fields: A Reminder of What Lay Beneath

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Aviation charts still mark the location of decommissioned infrastructure for a few years after removal, in case there are subsea structures or unburied pipelines. After that, the gas fields fade off the charts and into the records of the North Sea Transition Authority. The southe...