The Castor dismantling platform arrives at the port of Tarragona.

TarragonaThe offshore platform that will allow for the sealing and dismantling of the Castor platform, the underwater natural gas storage facility launched in 2012 by the Escal UGS company, arrived at the port of Tarragona at around 2 p.m. this Sunday. The impressive jack-up, The large self-elevating structure is the Noble Resolve model, property of the Noble Corporation company and has arrived from Denmark transported by a heavy lift vessel, a ship specialized in this type of transport. Over the next few days, the large platform will be towed again to be moved to the Castor warehouse, off the coast of Vinaròs. Once there, the jack-up It will deploy its three legs, each over 100 meters long, to reach the seabed and rise, creating a stable platform above sea level that will become the base of operations.

Work will begin this April. as reported exclusively by the newspaper ARA and, according to forecasts, in eight months the 13 Castor wells will be properly sealed and the pipes connecting the platform to the seabed removed. The final project to seal and remove the Castor project – from July 2021 and the responsibility of the company Enagás – commissioned by the Spanish government, planned for the work to be completed in December 2022, but everything has been delayed, among other reasons because the permits to carry out this operation have been postponed and to obtainjack-upIt's not easy. In another project, which still has no timeline, the two platforms above the sea, visible from the coast, will also be removed.

With public money

He jack-up, whose rent costs about $100,000 a day, It is a necessary structure for this type of work, as it allows access to the wells and also allows for the workers to settle in. According to the Enagás project, the two current platforms only have capacity for 25 people, while more than 100 workers are needed to carry out this operation. In fact, Castor was made from another jack-upThe work to seal and dismantle the wells will cost 76 million euros, paid for with state money, the owner of the warehouse since the cancellation of the project promoted by Florentino Pérez, director of the construction company ACS, owner of 66% of Escal UGS shares.

This work is very good news for the residents of the coastal towns that suffered the earthquakes of this massive fiasco, which will have resulted in a public bill of around 2 billion euros and without any casualties. The Castor project aimed to inject natural gas into underground cavities at the bottom of the sea, 22 km from Vinaròs and at a depth of around 1,920 meters. The company Escal UGS began drilling the wells in 2010, and after three years, gas was injected for the first time, an operation that caused earthquakes in the surrounding towns. A few days later, following constant earthquakes and pressure from residents, the Ministry of Industry ordered the suspension of natural gas injections. A year later, Escal UGS relinquished the Castor concession. The Spanish government, led by Mariano Rajoy, accepted the relinquishment through a royal decree that also approved the controversial €1.35 billion compensation payment to the company.