Design, operations planning and experience from the marine operations for the Europipe jacket with bucket foundations

The Europipe 16/11-E riser platform was successfully installed in the Norwegian part of the North Sea last summer. Rather than having the traditional piled foundations, the platform has bucket foundations consisting of one inverted 12m diameter bucket in each of the four Jacket corners. After set down of the Jacket on the seabed and self weight penetration, the Jacket legs were waterfilled and the buckets thus gained further penetration. Finally suction within the buckets penetrated them to target penetration. This paper describes the preparatory work and the installation of the structure, discusses the main problem areas and experiences gained from the installation.