From Stranded to Streaming: Adura's Conor Carleton Wins DEVEX Best Paper Award

Conor Carleton of Adura has been awarded the DEVEX Best Paper prize for his presentation on the Victory gas field development, a remarkable story of how one of the North Sea's longest-stranded discoveries was finally brought to life.

The Victory gas field sat undeveloped for nearly 50 years. Discovered in 1977 by Texaco in West of Shetland Block 207/01a, the field passed through successive hands before its licence was relinquished entirely in 2018. For decades, Victory was a textbook stranded asset, known, appraised, but never developed.

That all changed with a rapid sequence of events that Carleton's award-winning paper traces with striking clarity.

Corallian Energy was awarded the licence in December 2020, recognising that conditions in the West of Shetland basin had fundamentally shifted. Three converging factors created a genuine development opportunity: the installation of new gas infrastructure in the region, available capacity within that system, and a renewed political and commercial focus on domestic energy security in a lower-carbon world.

When Shell UK, now rebranded as Adura acquired Corallian Energy in October 2022, it inherited not just the licence but a clear imperative to move quickly.

What makes Victory's story particularly compelling is the pace at which Adura drove it forward. Just 14 months after acquisition, a Final Investment Decision (FID) was taken in January 2024. First Gas followed in September 2025, only 20 months after FID.

For a field that had spent decades gathering dust, this was a remarkable turnaround.

Carleton's paper, co-authored with Noah Jaffey, argues that this speed was no accident. The team adopted a deliberately pragmatic, value-focused approach to decision-making, one designed to maintain project momentum despite the field having only modest appraisal data. Rather than waiting for exhaustive subsurface certainty, the team prioritised preserving schedule and accelerating the decisions that mattered most.

Why This Paper Stands Out

The DEVEX Best Paper award recognises work that offers genuine insight and practical value to the industry. Carleton's submission delivers both. Victory is not just a commercial success story, it is a case study in how the North Sea industry can unlock value from legacy discoveries when the right mindset, infrastructure, and market conditions align.

At a time when energy security is firmly back on the agenda, the lessons from Victory are immediately relevant: stranded assets need not stay stranded, and pragmatic project execution can be a competitive advantage in its own right.

Conor Carleton presented this paper at DEVEX 2026. The award was judged by a panel of industry experts recognising outstanding contribution to technical and commercial knowledge-sharing in the upstream oil and gas sector.