For decades it was a workhorse in the North Sea oil fields, first as a drilling platform and then as a production facility.
But as these dramatic images show, it only took a few seconds to reduce the Northern Producer to a pile of scrap metal.
Footage shows the semi-submersible platform in a dry dock in north-west Scotland as demolition charges ignite on its legs.
Demolition charges ignite on the platform’s legs as it sits in the massive Loch Kishorn dry dock.
Smoke and decades of dust and dirt billow from the structure.
The platform disappears in a cloud of dust as it collapses
After years serving the North Sea oil industry, the platform is reduced to a pile of scrap metal.
The 12,000-tonne structure is then engulfed in clouds of dust, which eventually clear to reveal a massive pile of twisted metal.
Northern Producer was used in the Dons oilfields, about 100 miles north-east of Shetland.
But the fields have reached the end of their useful life and are being dismantled, so the structure was taken to dry dock at Kishorn Harbor in Strathcarron, Ross-shire, three years ago and blown up last week.
Work is now underway to recycle and reuse different parts of the platform, which was built in Norway in 1976 at the height of the North Sea oil boom.
The shipyard said it believed its dry dock, built in the 1970s for platform construction in the North Sea, was the first to be used to demolish a platform in this way.
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