Norway’s first spar platform good to go, regulator says

Statoil, soon to be named Equinor, has received consent from the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) to use the Aasta Hansteen spar platform, subsea systems, and infield pipelines on the Aasta Hansteen field in the Norwegian Sea.

The Aasta Hansteen field sits in the northern sector of the Norwegian Sea, 120 kilometers northwest of Norne and around 300 kilometers off the Nordland county coast. Water depth in the area is 1270 meters. The field is presently in development.

The field was proven in 1997 and the plan for development and operation was approved in 2013. The development solution is a spar platform, a floating facility consisting of a vertical cylindrical hull moored to the seabed and subsea templates, which are tied to the platform by pipelines and rigid steel risers.

The gas from Aasta Hansteen will be transported by the Polarled pipeline to the Nyhamna terminal in Møre og Romsdal county. Light oil (condensate) will be loaded into tankers and shipped to market.

The 24,000-tonne topside for the Aasta Hansteen platform was towed from Ølensvåg to Stord on the west coast of Norway in November 2017 and floated it over the 46,000-tonne floating vertical hull a month later. The 200-meter-long substructure was upended in July.

The completed platform, deemed the world’s largest spar platform, will be towed in the spring of 2018 to its Norwegian Sea location. The naming ceremony for the platform was held in Kvaerner’s Stord on International Women’s Day, March 8.

The Aasta Hansteen platform will be Norway’s first spar platform in production. Spar is a cylindrical, partially submerged offshore drilling and production platform that is particularly well adapted to deepwater.

The cylindrical substructure will be floating 160 meters below the surface and be anchored with fiber rope and chain fastened to anchors on the seabed at around 1 260 meters water depth in the Norwegian Sea.

Offshore Energy Today Staff