TOTAL E&P UK: MCP-01 platform, Frigg Transportation System and St Fergus papers

The records have been arranged into five function-based sub-fonds. The first three, MCP-01, St Fergus and the Frigg Transportation System (FTS), contain records created by and necessary to run those installations. It includes procedure manuals, safety records, logs, photographs, surveys, correspondence and reports. The fourth, Total Publications, comprises publications by Total that are about Frigg or the company in general, and that were neither created by the installations nor necessary to run them. The fifth sub-fonds comprises oral history recordings and summaries.

Gas from the several fields utilising the FTS (joining at either the Manifold Compression Platform MCP-01 or formerly TP1 and TCP2 at the Frigg Field) is processed at the terminal. Records concerning these are not within the scope of this project and have not been actively accessioned. This includes records relating to active fields where pipeline bypass works were carried out as a result of Frigg's decommissioning. Those records have remained with the records of the mother field. Due to the interlinked nature of the fields and pipelines, however, there are some records that make reference to those other fields or pipelines.

Total Oil Marine (TOM) was incorporated on 8 July 1964 as a subsidiary of Total Compagnie Francaise des Petroles. After the 1999 merger with PetroFina, the company was called TotalFina and TotalFinaElf following another merger a year later, with Elf Aquitaine. In May 2003 it was renamed Total. Total has operations in 130 countries and, then as now, is headquartered in Paris.

TOM was concerned with the exploration and drilling in the North Sea. After the discovery of Frigg gas in 1972, TOM assumed responsibility for the design, construction and operation of the Frigg Transportation System and onshore terminal from Aberdeen, Scotland. Elf, based in Stavanger, Norway, was responsible for the Frigg Field.

The UK upstream subsidiary has been through several changes and in the latest, became a Private Limited Company on 15 January 2007. Since then its name has been Total E&P UK Ltd. The catalogue uses the company's name as it was when the documents were created. Based in Aberdeen, Scotland, it is the fourth-largest operator in the UK sector of the North Sea.

Total operates the UK pipeline which used to be part of the Frigg Transportation System and continues to operate the terminal at St Fergus. The Norwegian pipeline, now re-named Vesterled, is operated by Gassco, and Total is the technical operator.

Due to the restructuring of the departments and their roles, and the inheritance of records due to mergers with other companies, it has not always been possible to identify and re-create the original record-keeping structure. The records are, therefore, grouped by installation then by department and function. The first three sub-fonds contain records produced by and for the MCP-01, FTS or St Fergus. Publications about these installations are available in 'TOTAL Publications'. The fifth lists the oral history interviews.

• MS 3801/1: Records relating to MCP-01
• MS 3801/2: Records relating to St Fergus
• MS 3801/3: Records relating to the Frigg Transportation System
• MS 3801/4: TOTAL Publications
• MS 3801/5: Oral History Recordings

Most of the material is available by prior appointment subject to the usual conditions of access to Archives and Manuscripts material. Please contact speclib@abdn.ac.uk at least two working days before your visit to make arrangements to view any unrestricted material. Some records are restricted either due to business confidentiality or Data Protection reasons. Researchers wishing access to restricted material should apply outlining the nature of their enquiry.

Access restrictions will be reviewed every five years.

For the bulk of the collection, there are no physical conditions affecting access. Some records are only available digitally, usually PDF. Although the majority of material is in English, there is a small minority of records in or partly in French or Norwegian, for which there may not always be an English translation available.

Permission to make any published use of material from the collection must be sought in advance from the Head of Special Libraries and Archives and from the copyright owner. Responsibility for ensuring copyright clearance rests with the user of the material.

The collection has been appraised in line with normal archival procedures. Duplicates have been removed where possible. Company records relating to the Frigg Field as a whole have been included where they contain relevant information or are necessary to provide context, but otherwise are considered to be outside the scope of the collection.

Retained by various European offices of Total or by specialist offsite storage companies before being passed to the Archive.

Yes

Material relating to other installations in the Frigg field is held by the Norwegian Petroleum Museum and the State Archives in Stavanger: please see the Frigg Industrial Heritage project website for more details.

Several smaller, offshore-related collections have also been accessioned at the University of Aberdeen. See the Special Collections Centre's Oil & Gas Resources factsheet for further details.

Crossing Boundaries: Frigg Industrial Heritage (ed. Kristin Oye Gjerde, Norwegian Petroleum Museum, 2009).