Statoil and its partners submitted the plan for development and operation (PDO) of the North Sea Oseberg Vestflanken 2 to the authorities, 18 December 2015. The development will provide in excess of 100 million barrels of oil equivalent.
Statoil and its licence partners have decided to develop the Oseberg Vestflanken 2 covering the Alpha, Gamma and Kappa oil and gas structures. They are located around eight kilometres northwest of the Oseberg field centre.
The Oseberg Vestflanken development will consist of an unmanned wellhead platform with 10 well slots. The wells will be remote-controlled from the Oseberg field centre. Two existing subsea wells will also be reused.
Wellhead platforms with no facilities, helicopter deck or lifeboats represent a new solution in Norway, but it has been thoroughly tested in other areas, such as the Danish and Dutch continental shelves.
“Oseberg Vestflanken 2 will add 110 million profitable barrels of oil equivalent, and will be an important contribution in reaching Statoil´s goal of maintaining the current production level until 2030 and beyond,” says senior vice president for the operations west cluster in Statoil Gunnar Nakken.
The well stream will be routed to Oseberg field centre via a new pipeline. Production start is scheduled for the second quarter of 2018.
Oseberg Vestflanken 2 is the first of three planned phases for developing the remaining reserves in the Oseberg area.
The licensees are: Statoil (operator) (49.3%), Petoro (33.6%), Total (14.7%) and ConocoPhillips (2.4%).