Statoil Tie Offshore Units as Hyme Starts Production
Hyme field with a subsea template tied in to existing infrastructure on the Njord A platform: Image credit Statoil
Statoil and its partners begin production from the Hyme oil field in the southern part of the Norwegian Sea.
The Hyme field was discovered at Haltenbanken in June 2009, 19 kilometres north-east of the Njord A platform. It is tied in to existing infrastructure on Njord A, and extends the production life of the Njord field from 2015 to 2020. The field development plan includes a production well and a water injection well drilled through a subsea template with four well slots as well as five new risers and Njord A modifications to receive Hyme production are also part of the project. The investments total some NOK 4.5 billion.
“This development will revitalise the entire area, open for further expansion and increase the production life of Njord,” Knudsen says.
“The field came on stream one month earlier than we assumed in the plan for development and operation (PDO). We decided to use Njord A as a tie-in platform and to first oil is thus slightly more than two years, which we are very pleased with,” says Halfdan Knudsen, head of the “fast-track” portfolio in Development and Production Norway (DPN).
The “fast-track” projects consist of discoveries made close to existing fields. In the longer term the aim is to bring these projects from discovery to first oil within 30 months.
Due to the high reservoir complexity an unconventional well solution has been chosen for Hyme. It involves the use of a multilateral well for optimal drainage of the reservoir.
“The chosen optimised drainage solution increases the estimated recoverable volumes from Hyme by about 17 percent compared with the assumption at the basis for the PDO. According to recent estimates Hyme contains some 30 million barrels of recoverable reserves. With the field’s life expected to last beyond 2020, further volume increases may be expected at Njord. We have successfully delivered another high-quality fast-track project before schedule and below budget. Good cooperation with our partners and suppliers has been essential to this successful execution,” says Kjetel Digre, head of the fast-track and subsea project portfolio in Technology, Projects and Drilling (TPD).
