Total battles to extend life of North Sea field

* Elgin platform produces 7 pct of British gas, oil output

* Total battles to curb declining North Sea oil production

* Invests to extend life span of Elgin fields to 2025-2026

By Benjamin Mallet

ELGIN FRANKLIN RIG, NORTH SEA, June 8 (Reuters) - Extreme technical conditions and declining production -- Total's (TOTF.PA) Elgin Franklin platform in the North Sea shows the challenges of oil that is becoming scarcer and harder to reach.

To the untrained eye a 33,000 tonne jumble of interlaced pipes perched 22 metres above the freezing waters of the North Sea, Elgin pumps 7 percent of Britain's oil and gas output.

It operates four fields as deep as 6 km below the sea bed, where high drilling temperatures and pressure make the oil search like trying to make a hole in a pressure cooker.

"Elgin has always been a platform of new technologies, new developments, at the frontiers of what was done," said Iain Park, head of Elgin production.

It came on stream in 2001 and produces 220,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, half in crude and the rest in gas.

But this will decline from mid-2010, pushing Total to increase exploration and innovation efforts to keep going until the last exploitable barrel.

That means more investments at a time when Total is already spending billions of dollars to find new oil in increasingly difficult conditions, such as ultra deep offshore developments with oil 800 metres below the sea bed and with 1.5 km of water above it before it reaches the surface.

INVESTING IN HARD TIMES

This also comes after a halving in crude oil prices that has led several oil groups, but not Total, to trim investments. Total plans to spend $18 billion in 2009 as it seeks to increase its hydrocarbon output, despite difficult economic conditions.

"The cost of developing Elgin-Franklin was 1.7 billion pounds ($2.70 billion) but this would cost three times as much today," Thierry Bourgeois, head of operations at Total Exploration and Production UK, told reporters on the platform.

Drilling a seventeenth well, which is due to start producing at the end of the year, Total houses 500 staff on the platform -- five times as more as usual -- with many assigned to renovate a platform gnawed by rust.

About 40 extra bedrooms are being built, and although the spartan 10 square metre rooms recall budget hotels rather than cruise liners, they offer an indispensable haven from machinery and the comings and goings of helicopters.

The platform also offers a gym, a snooker room and a restaurant to entertain workers forced to cohabitate with very little privacy.

Elgin Franklin was originally due to produce until 2022 but the discovery of new satellite fields, combined with access to new reserves that were technically out of reach before, means Total could extend the lifespan of the fields to 2025 or 2026, perhaps further with the help of new technologies.

To read "Total aims for cost cuts, new fields in North Sea" please click on [ID:nLT208885 ].

(Writing by Marie Maitre, editing by William Hardy)