Oil boom: Dramatic footage shows 12,000 ton North Sea behemoth reduced to a pile of twisted metal in seconds
It was a work horse in the North Sea oil fields for decades, first as a drilling rig and then as a production facility.
But as these dramatic images show it took just seconds to reduce the Northern Producer to a pile of scrap metal.
Footage shows the semi-submersible rig sitting in a dry dock in north-west Scotland as demolition charges ignite in its legs.
Demolition charges ignite in the rig's legs as it sits in the huge dry dock on Loch Kishorn
Smoke and decades of dust and dirt erupt from the structure
The rig disappears in a cloud of dust as it collapses
After years serving the North Sea oil industry the rig is reduced to a pile of scrap
The 12,000 ton structure is then enveloped in clouds of dust, which eventually clear to show a huge pile of twisted metal.
Northern Producer was used in the Dons oil fields, about 100 miles north-east of Shetland.
But the fields have reached the end of their life and are being de-commissioned, so the structure was taken to Kishorn Port’s dry dock facility in Strathcarron, Ross-shire, three years ago and blown up last week.
Work is now under way to recycle and reuse different parts of the rig, which was built in Norway in 1976 at the height of the North Sea oil boom.
The yard said it believed its dry dock, which was built in the 1970s for the construction of North Sea platforms, was the first to be used to demolish a rig in this way.
