Statoil has awarded Wood Group with a contract for subsea field concept engineering at the Snorre expansion project on the Norwegian continental shelf (NCS).
The Norwegian oil producer had originally planned to build a new platform to boost oil recovery at the North Sea oilfield, but this plan was abandoned earlier this year in favour of a subsea solution, which could save Statoil up to 40% in costs. Installing a new platform would have cost up to NOK 40bn ($4.9bn), according to a 2013 estimate.
In the project, Wood Group will install a tieback from the Snorre reservoir to the existing Snorre A tension leg platform and gas import from Gullfaks A. The contract also includes options for front-end engineering design (FEED), detailed design and fabrication, Wood Group said today.
Expansion work at the Snorre field could yield an additional 300m barrels of oil, but Statoil delayed the project in March 2015 after the drop in oil prices made work commercially unfeasible. The company received a warning from the Norwegian government a month later, saying it should press on with the project regardless.
Meanwhile, at Statoil’s Oseberg field development, Wood Group Kenny is to provide detailed design for two pipelines with corresponding spools and an umbilical, which will form part of the tieback from the future unmanned wellhead (UWP) platform to the Oseberg field centre.
Wood Group Kenny will also provide FEED support to engineering work on pipelines at the Utgard field development, in which the planned subsea template will be tied back to the Sleipner T platform. Lifetime extension studies will also be conducted on the pipeline system in the Gullfaks field.
