Statoil shuts Sleipner A production after alarm goes off

Norwegian oil giant Statoil has shut production on one of its offshore platforms in the North Sea.

Reuters on Saturday reported, citing Aftenblad, a Stavanger-based newspaper, that Statoil had closed production from its Sleipner A platform following a gas alarm.

Reportedly, a condensate evaporation triggered the alarm, but the issue was soon resolved, and none of the 233 workers aboard the platform needed to be evacuated.

Statoil did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment, sent by Offshore Energy Today.

The Sleipner A is a drilling and production platform, located at the Sleipner East gas field in the Norwegian part of the North Sea.

1991 incident

The platform became famous on August 23, 1991, when the concrete gravity base structure for Sleipner A sank to the bottom of the Gands Fjord near Stavanger due to a flaw in the design. The GBS structure ended up in more than 200 metres of water, just before it was to be joined with the topsides.

Norwegian Contractors, which had built the original GBS, completed a replacement soon after the incident, allowing for gas deliveries from Sleipner East to start on the contractual date of 1 October 1993.

Sleipner East

As part of the Sleipner East development, the Loke and Sigyn gas and condensate satellite has been tied back to Sleipner A. Condensate from Sleipner East is piped to Kårstø north of Stavanger for processing.

Gas from the field is transported in the Statpipe and Zeepipe to Emden and Zeebrugge in Belgium.

Update: 18.8.2014,(1:08 p.m CET) :

In an e-mail sent to Offshore Energy Today, Ørjan Heradstveit, media contact for Statoil’s upstream activities, confirmed there was a gas alarm at the Sleipner A installation on Saturday morning.

“The situation occurred due to some condensate vapour, but it was quickly normalized. Sleipner A is currently in a scheduled maintenance stop mode and production was shut down when alarm went off,” Heradstveit said.

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