Page 26 - FINAL Phillips 66 50 Year Book

the most recent of the natural gas fields found in the North Sea – the
Viking Field – which was discovered jointly by Conoco and the National
Coal Board.

“The terminal, if approved, will have an ultimate processing capacity
in the region of 3000 million cubic feet of gas per day. The initial cost
of the project is likely to be in the region of £5 million but expenditure
could be as high as £10 million if and when the ultimate capacity is
reached.

“The Conoco-NCB Group, for which Conoco acts as operator, will build a
plant on the site to prepare the gas to meet Gas Council specifications,
and the Council will build its own plant to receive the treated gas,
control its quality, and meter it, prior to its dispatch into the national
transmission system for natural gas.”

The scale of the Humber Refinery’s operations was hard to miss. The
new Conoco-NCB Viking gas terminal at Theddlethorpe was built, and
natural gas was transported to it by a transmission pipeline. The Viking
terminal fed British Gas Council distribution lines serving London and
other markets with clean natural gas. Viking was Conoco’s first major
upstream development outside Libya, Dubai and North America.

And as it turned out, the Viking discovery began a chain of events that
would silence the critics.

“When we built the Humber, everyone figured we’d built it on the wrong
side of the country,” recalled Gary Edwards, Conoco’s executive vice
president for downstream during the 1990s. “Gulf, Texaco and other oil

Above: Viking Gas Terminal.