OKEA to carry out P&A ops in Norwegian Sea with COSL Drilling’s rig

Norwegian offshore safety regulator has given OKEA its consent to use a COSL Drilling-owned semi-submersible rig for plug and abandonment operations at a field in the Norwegian Sea.

The Petroleum Safety Authority Norway (PSA) informed on Monday that it had given OKEA consent to use the COSL Promoter rig for the permanent plug and abandonment of wells on the Draugen field.

The 2012-built COSL Promoter is a semi-submersible drilling rig designed to operate in water depths up to 750 meters. Back in May 2021, OKEA signed a four-year-long frame contract with COSL Drilling Europe for the use of its drilling rigs on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.

Located in the southern part of the Norwegian Sea, the Draugen field in production licence 093 lies at a water depth of 250 metres. Originally awarded on 9 March 1984, the Draugen licence has been extended until 9 March 2024.

OKEA is the operator of the licence with a 44.56 per cent working interest, while its partners are M Vest Energy with a 7.56 per cent stake and Petoro with 47.88 per cent interest. Since taking over the operatorship of the Draugen field in 2018, OKEA has worked on reducing downtime and optimising production.

Discovered in 1984, the Draugen field has been developed with a concrete fixed facility and integrated topside and has both platform and subsea wells. In the presentation regarding its results from the first quarter of 2022, OKEA revealed that its net production from Draugen was 6,877 boepd, elaborating that the lower production compared to the previous quarter was mainly due to natural decline as well as a black-out caused by a trip of power turbines when starting up the loading pump for offloading.

The company advised that the issue was resolved within a few days and the total impact in the quarter from this occurrence was approximately 200 boepd net to OKEA. The firm further added that a scale squeeze campaign on platform wells was successfully executed in the period and will contribute to high production reliability from the wells going forward.

In addition, a water injection test on the northern water injection template (NWIT) was completed as well which provides valuable data to assess future economic value from the water injection wells in the northern part of the Draugen reservoir, according to OKEA.

As the operator of Draugen, OKEA is currently developing the Hasselmus field as a single subsea gas well with direct tie-back to the Draugen platform for further processing and export. The production start-up is planned for the fourth quarter of 2023 with gross plateau gas production of more than 4,400 barrels boepd.

In July 2021, Aker Solutions was awarded a contract to modify the Draugen platform to enable the processing of gas from the Hasselmus discovery. According to OKEA, the pre-fabrications operations at Aker Egersund were planned to begin in the second quarter of 2022. Moreover, subsea rock installation to support the new gas pipeline from Hasselmus to Draugen is being executed by OneSubsea and Subsea 7 and it started in March.

In line with this, the COSL Promoter rig is expected to drill a production well this summer. The company sees Hasselmus as an important enabler for the long-term development of Draugen, which supports the latter’s potential as “an important hub in the area.”

The work to prepare for the power from shore project to the Draugen production platform is ongoing. This project includes an extension of the power supply to the nearby Njord field. The project’s final investment decision and submission of a plan for development and operations (PDO) are planned for the fourth quarter of 2022.

The power from shore project is scheduled to be ready for operation in 2025 and is expected to reduce the annual CO2 emissions from Draugen alone by approximately 200,000 tonnes which corresponds to a reduction of 95 per cent compared to 2019 levels.