VIDEO: First Johan Sverdrup jacket heads to North Sea

Oil company Lundin Norway has informed that the first steel jacket for the Johan Sverdrup field center left the shipyard in Verdal and has set a course for the North Sea, off Norway. 

Statoil is the operator of the Johan Sverdrup development with a working interest of 40.0267 percent. The license partners are Lundin Norway, Petoro, Aker BP, and Maersk Oil with 22.6, 17.36, 11.5733, and 8.44 percent interests, respectively.

The first phase of the Johan Sverdrup field development will consist of four installations, including a utility and accommodation platform, a processing platform, a drilling platform and a riser platform, as well as three subsea water injection templates.

According to Lundin, the riser jacket set sail for the North Sea on Sunday, July 23. This is the first part of the field center that will be visible above the sea surface and it will carry the riser platform.

Lundin also said that the jacket was the largest ever built for use on the Norwegian shelf and weighs about 26,000 tonnes. It was built at Kværner’s shipyard in Verdal, where it was named Aegir back in June. Kvaerner will also build two of the three remaining jackets meant for the drilling and processing platforms. Dragados Offshore was put in charge of building the fourth jacket, for the utility and accommodation platform.

The Johan Sverdrup field covers an area of around 200 square kilometers on the Utsira High in the central part of the North Sea, 140 km west of Stavanger. The Plan for Development and Operation for Johan Sverdrup Phase 1 was approved by the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy on August 20, 2015. The first phase is currently estimated at NOK 99 billion ($12.3 billion), a reduction of NOK 24 billion ($3 billion) since the PDO was submitted.

The construction work for Phase 1 is currently about halfway complete, and production start-up for phase one is planned towards the end of 2019. The field will be operated by electrical power generated onshore.

Gross resources for the entire field are estimated to between two and three billion barrels of oil equivalent making it one of the five largest fields ever discovered on the NCS. Lundin estimates that, once the field reaches the expected plateau rate of 660,000 barrels per day, production from the field will amount to about 25 percent of total Norwegian oil production.

Oil from the field will be piped to the Mongstad terminal in Hordaland and gas will be transported via Statpipe to the Kårstø processing plant in North Rogaland.

Offshore Energy Today Staff