Winners of Best Student Project

We congratulate Finn Rasmussen and Stian Sandanger, winners of the best BSc project 2025, with the title “Electromechanical cutting tool for well decommissioning”.

With an increasing demand for decommissioning within the oil and gas industry, companies are seeking improved solutions.

The development of an electromechanical cutting tool for the casing strings has the potential to increase efficiency, reduce equipment and mobilisation time, resulting in lower cost for the operators.

We learned a lot working on real challenges

–Working with Claxton Engineering Services on this project was highly motivating and challenging, as many aspects of the project were unfamiliar and different from our coursework, says Finn Rasmussen and Stian Sandanger.

– We’ve had the opportunity to immerse ourselves in an important part of the Norwegian oil and gas industry, learning about well constructions, plug and abandonment operations, and the decommissioning of wells, the winners explain.

The students were supervised by Ragnar Gjengedal, associate professor at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL) and Michal Koranek, Project Team Lead at Claxton Engineering Services.

– It was a pleasure to supervise Finn and Stian. They were driven by an internal curiosity that enabled them to seek solutions to problems that occurred during the work. Their academic capabilities also enabled them to find limitations to the proposed solutions, and these are personal properties that will benefit them in the life as professional engineers, says Ragnar.

Triggers the interest for further studies

Finn:
– After I finished my bachelor’s degree, I got the opportunity to work as a summer intern at Claxton Engineering. Here I got to learn more about the management of decommissioning projects and how they are carried out. After my internship during the summer I continued my studies in Trondheim, doing a master’s in product development and production at NTNU, specializing in Product development and materials.

Stian:
– Working on this project, exploring new fields of study and designing a tool with future potential in decommissioning, has motivated me to continue my education with a master’s in mechanical engineering. The experience of developing a functioning tool where electronic systems and programming are key areas has inspired me to direct my focus on robotics and mechatronics.

Impressive level 

– There was a high level of different student projects that were nominated, says Jon Hellevang, R&D Manager at GCE Ocean Technology and Head of the jury.

– It is great to see how students collaborate with industry to provide innovative solutions to huge challenges. The winning project combined knowledge within different fields and delivered a project on a very high level. Once again congratulations to the winners, Hellevang ends.