By Anandita Mehrotra
(Reuters) -British oil and gas group Serica Energy lowered its 2025 production forecast on Tuesday, pressured by delays in output at its Triton floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) unit in the North Sea.
Shares of the London-listed firm fell as much as 7.5% to 124.2 pence.
Serica has increased production through acquisitions and investments in recent years but faced challenges in 2024 due to an outage at its Triton FPSO operation.
“It has been a frustrating start to the year due to issues at Triton. While the first half is pretty disappointing, the second half of this year should be great,” CEO Chris Cox told Reuters in an interview.
Critical repairs at Triton due to damage from Storm Eowyn in January were originally expected to be completed by mid- to late-March, and production was meant to resume in May.
Serica said on Tuesday it now expects production at Triton to resume in June as its joint venture partners had moved up the timeline for summer maintenance. No further shutdowns were planned for 2025, it added.
The company revised its annual production forecast to between 33,000 and 37,000 barrels of oil equivalent (boepd) per day, down from 40,000 boepd earlier.
Its production for 2024 fell to 34,600 boepd from 40,100 boepd in 2023.
The results come against the backdrop of Britain’s windfall tax, which pushed some companies to sell assets and others to merge operations and seek to diversify to other regions.
Serica, which is discussing a possible deal with North Sea-focused oil producer EnQuest , declined to give an update on the talks ahead of an April 4 deadline for EnQuest to make an offer.
(Reporting by Anandita Mehrotra in Bengaluru; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips and Joe Bavier)
