Shares in Serica Energy PLC (AIM:SQZ) slumped by 12.5% on Wednesday after the North Sea oil and gas group cut its production forecast for next year, blaming equipment problems and an unexpected change to maintenance plans at one of its key offshore hubs.
Production at the Triton floating platform, which serves several Serica-linked fields, is currently running at a reduced rate due to a vibration issue in the gas compression system.
The company said normal operations are not expected to resume until the end of September, once repairs are completed and both compressors are fully operational.
In August, Serica had been producing more than 25,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day from Triton.
Once both compressors are running, it is expected that the figure will increase, including new output from the EV-02 well on the Evelyn field.
However, Serica also revealed that Dana Petroleum, which operates the Triton vessel, has brought forward subsea work on the Bittern field.
The intervention, now scheduled for November next year, had originally been pushed into 2026. The three-week programme will halt production not only from Bittern, but also from the Evelyn and Gannet fields.
Serica expects this will reduce its production by more than 20,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day during the outage.
As a result, the company has lowered its production guidance for 2025 to between 29,000 and 32,000 barrels per day. Its previous forecast was in the range of 33,000 to 35,000.
The Triton facility is a floating production, storage and offloading unit, known in the industry as an FPSO. These vessels act as processing and storage hubs for oil and gas produced from surrounding fields, and are particularly common in deepwater and North Sea operations.
Serica said the planned work was necessary to address what it called an “emerging vulnerability” in the subsea infrastructure. It did not provide further detail on the specific issue, but confirmed that the change in schedule came from the operator, not Serica itself.
The company said the technical content of the update had been reviewed by Fergus Jenkins, its vice president for technical matters. Jenkins is a chartered engineer with more than 25 years of experience in oil and gas.