Baker Hughes and Schlumberger land service contracts for Cat J rigs

Statoil has informed that Baker Hughes and Schlumberger will be awarded the contracts for integrated drilling and well services on the Cat J rigs Askepott and Askeladden.

The rigs will perform work at Oseberg and the Gullfaks fields, offshore Norway.

Statoil said on Wednesday that, initially awarded for four years, the contracts include options for two 2-year extensions. The contracts include cementing and pumping, completion, drilling and completion fluids, and integrated drilling services.

Schlumberger is currently delivering integrated drilling and well services at Mariner and Baker Hughes at Johan Sverdrup field. The Norwegian head offices of both companies are located in Stavanger.

“We look forward to working closely with these two suppliers on the licenses’ own rigs. These contracts will help increase activities on the Norwegian continental shelf, ensure predictability, and create more jobs,” says Geir Tungesvik, Statoil’s senior vice president for drilling & well.

The Norwegian oil company noted that Oseberg Cat J will contribute to continued development of the Oseberg area. From the autumn of 2017, the rig will drill wells for the Vestflanken 2 project. Later, the rig may be used for further developing the area in the Oseberg Future Development, phases 2 and 3.

The past four years the Gullfaks field has seen substantial investments and upgrading. In 2016, consent to extended field life to 2034 was granted, almost 30 years beyond the original PDO estimate, which was 2005. The Cat J rig will be essential to the continued development of the Gullfaks field, Statoil said.

Cat J rigs

Owned by the Gullfaks and Oseberg licenses, the Cat J jack-up rigs are tailored to the conditions in the North Sea, where they are scheduled to be installed in the summer and autumn of 2017, respectively.

They are currently being built at Samsung Heavy Industries shipyard in South Korea and they are expected at the Norwegian Coast Center Base (CCB) in the second quarter of 2017.

The Cat J rigs are specially designed to perform efficient drilling operations on subsea development solutions in addition to conventional surface drilling from fixed platforms.

The rigs have derrick, allowing 40-meter pipe joints to be put together to increase the efficiency of the operations. They feature automatic pipe handling and the opportunity to perform parallel operations – i.e. making up pipe while drilling.

According to Statoil, they will be instrumental in ensuring that the licenses recover all profitable reserves, and may also be used for exploration.

The introductory Askeladden drilling program focuses on proven reserves and gas blowdown wells on one of the Gullfaks satellite fields. Askepott will primarily drill through the unmanned wellhead platform at Vestflanken 2, which is part of Oseberg.