For eight out of 12 months, thick sheets of ice cover the soon-to-be-operational Kirinskoye field located offshore Sakhalin Island. This leaves four relatively ice-free months for operator Gazprom Dobycha Shelf to accomplish the upgrades and preventive maintenance necessary to keep gas and condensate flowing over the next 30 years through Russia’s first subsea production facility.

Discovered in water depths of approximately 90 m (300 ft), Kirinskoye is part of the Kirinski block – one of four blocks – that form part of the Sakhalin III development. Discovered in 1992, Gazprom estimates gas reserves in the field total 162.5 Bcm (5.7 Tcf), with gas production estimated to be 5.5 Bcm (194 Bcf) per year.

The produced gas mixture is set to begin flowing from the field to the onshore processing facility via a 28-km (17-mile) subsea pipeline for treatment before it is transferred to the 139-km (86-mile) gas pipeline to the main compressor station of the Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok gas pipeline in 2014, according to the operator.

FMC Technologies was awarded the contract for the manufacture and supply of the subsea production equipment in 2010.

“Gazprom approached us and asked, ‘What kind of technology do we need for this field?’” said Arild Selvig, director of sales and marketing for FMC Technologies. “We were able to recommend standard systems in our portfolio that suited the field conditions.”

These field conditions include – in addition to being covered under ice for most of the year – a lack of infrastructure in the remote area, according to Selvig.

“We asked why they were interested in subsea,” he said. “One driver for them was surface climate conditions like ice, darkness, wind, and sea currents. They would like to avoid surface facilities and put as much as possible on the seabed.

“The other is limited infrastructure like airports, roads, and ports. Subsea equipment can be manufactured elsewhere, transported directly to the site by barge, and installed in the field. We’re independent of infrastructure.”

The Arctic’s remoteness – particularly the impact of long distances on control system operations, power generation, and flow assurance – presents a key technical challenge in unlocking the full potential of the area, Selvig said. Another unsolved issue is effective well intervention in ice-affected areas, he noted.

So how will the six subsea wells of Kirinskoye be monitored when the bitter winds blow across the Sea of Okhotsk?

“We included in our delivery our condition and performance monitoring system,” Selvig said. “It is a surveillance system that monitors the equipment to ensure it is running safely, to ensure that we see a potential malfunction coming before it occurs. It’s an additional safety feature since the systems are under ice eight months of the year.”

Offshore