Case study — revisiting a paper originally presented in March 2018.
Suction bucket wellhead platforms offer a way to cut both capex and decommissioning costs on marginal offshore fields, and it’s a technology ICON Engineering has been developing in partnership with Norwegian geotechnical specialist NGI since well before it became an industry talking point.
In March 2018, ICON and NGI jointly presented “Rapidly Rig Installable and Re-Usable Suction Bucket Wellhead Platforms” at the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) Asia, held at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre from 20 to 23 March. The paper was delivered on the Friday of the conference and co-authored by Andrew Deeks, Peter Gaunt, Øyvind Torgersrud and Noel Boylan of NGI, alongside ICON’s David Field and Darren O’Leary.
OTC Asia is the region’s counterpart to the long-running Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, bringing operators, contractors and researchers together to discuss offshore engineering advances across the region. Presenting alongside NGI put ICON’s Minimal Facility Wellhead Platform work in front of exactly the audience evaluating marginal field and decommissioning solutions across Southeast Asia and beyond.
How Suction Bucket Wellhead Platforms Cut Capex
The paper set out how suction bucket wellhead platforms reduce capex by standardising platform components and installing them using a jackup drilling rig rather than a conventional derrick barge. Removing the barge from the installation sequence cuts vessel costs and schedule risk, since the same jackup already contracted to drill or work over the wells can also install, and later remove, the platform.
The foundation technology itself is what makes that reuse possible. Suction buckets are installed and retrieved using differential water pressure rather than pile-driving, which makes them faster to install, quieter, and straightforward to pull back out at end of field life. The underlying jacket-and-foundation concept also draws on components with an established track record across both the offshore oil and gas sector and the offshore wind industry, where suction bucket foundations have increasingly been adopted for turbine support structures. For operators facing the current wave of offshore decommissioning obligations, that reusability is a direct route to lower abandonment costs, a point the paper highlighted as being of particular interest to the industry at the time.
The ICON–NGI Collaboration
The suction bucket wellhead platform concept combines ICON’s Minimal Facility Wellhead Platform designs with NGI’s specialist suction pile foundation engineering. NGI is one of the world’s leading geotechnical research institutes, with a long track record in suction anchor and suction caisson design for both oil and gas structures and, more recently, offshore wind foundations.
For ICON, the partnership reflects a broader approach: pairing proven Minimal Facilities Platform design work with specialist third-party expertise where it genuinely improves the outcome for operators, rather than trying to hold every discipline in-house. It’s the same approach that underpins ICON’s position as the world’s leading provider of rig-installed wellhead platforms, a track record built by combining rig-installation expertise with the right specialist partners project by project.
Why This Still Matters
Almost a decade on, the capex and decommissioning pressures the paper addressed have only intensified. Marginal field development remains commercially marginal without genuine cost reductions in installation and abandonment, and offshore decommissioning continues to be a major cost centre for operators across mature basins. A rig-installable, re-usable wellhead platform foundation directly addresses both pressures at once, installation cost and end-of-life removal cost, rather than trading one off against the other.
The full technical paper, including the structural and foundation engineering detail behind the concept, is available through OTC Asia’s conference proceedings on OnePetro.
ICON continues to apply the same combination of rig-installation expertise, minimal facilities design, and specialist foundation partnerships across its current wellhead platform and decommissioning work. Operators evaluating suction bucket wellhead platforms for marginal field development or end-of-life removal are welcome to get in touch with ICON’s engineering team directly.
