Qualla: West Sole Gas Field

West Sole Gas Field: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1967, somewhere in a 12-mile-long underwater structure 44 miles off the East Yorkshire coast, a valve opened and natural gas flowed up through a steel riser to a platform deck and onward through 16-inch pipeline to Easington on the Holderness shore. It was the first offshore gas Britain had ever produced. The country had been burning town gas - manufactured from coal, smelly and feeble - since the 19th century. Within a decade of West Sole's first gas, the entire national network would be converted to natural gas. Every kitchen burner in Britain would need a new jet. West Sole, discovered two years earlier in 1965, started all of that.

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West Sole Gas Field: Naming a Field for a Lost Place

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The field takes its name from the Sole Pit, a deep underwater basin in the southern North Sea named for the sole fish that trawlers once dragged from it in quantity. Geologists liked the name and applied it upward, to a gas-bearing structure they identified in the rock beneath th...

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West Sole Gas Field: The Villages Beneath the Sea

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

BP, which developed West Sole, named its later platforms in the area for villages that no longer exist. Cleeton, Dimlington, Hoton, Hyde, Newsham, Ravenspurn - all once stood on the Holderness coast of East Yorkshire and all have been swallowed by the North Sea over the centuries...

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West Sole Gas Field: 57 Billion Cubic Metres

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The original estimate put the gas in place at 57 billion cubic metres - enough to heat several million British homes for years on end. Production climbed through the late 1970s and peaked in 1983 at 1,719 mcm in a single year. After that came the long, gradual decline that every ...

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West Sole Gas Field: Easington, on the Other End of the Pipe

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The two pipelines from West Sole - 16-inch and 24-inch in diameter - come ashore at the Easington gas terminal on the East Yorkshire coast, where they join one of the largest gas-receiving complexes in Britain. Easington is where North Sea gas becomes British gas; where it is met...

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West Sole Gas Field: A Working Monument

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

West Sole is still producing. That alone makes it remarkable - most contemporary fields are decommissioned. The platforms have been through multiple rebuilds, ownership changes, and process upgrades, but the wells in 9,000 feet of Permian sandstone still flow. Stand on the Holder...

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