PSA Inspects Statoil’s Johan Castberg Subsea Solutions

Patroleum Safety Authority (PSA) Norway has carried out an audit of subsea solutions at Statoil’s Johan Castberg project.

The objective of the audit was to verify that, in the early stages of Johan Castberg, Statoil is planning and engineering in accordance with internal and regulatory requirements, and that changes in engineering documentation from the first plan for development have been evaluated and documented.

According to PSA, no non-conformities or improvement points were identified.

“The background to this audit was our main theme for 2017 – “Reversing the trend”, which emphasizes robustness, standards and collaboration as important topics. There have been a number of incidents relating to subsea facilities in recent years and we wish to see how experience and learning from these have been used in execution of this project,” PSA said.

The audit is also a key preparatory activity for processing a plan for development and operation (PDO) which is scheduled for submission in late 2017.

The Johan Castberg development is planned to consist of a large subsea system tied in to a FPSO vessel. Recoverable resources are estimated at 450-650 million barrels of oil equivalent. The field is located in the Barents Sea, 240 kilometres north-west of Hammerfest. 30 wells are planned to be drilled on the field in the period 2019-2024.