With first steel being cut earlier this month for Statoil’s deepwater Aasta Hansteen field offshore Norway, the project was much in the spotlight at the MCE Deepwater Development event, organised by Quest Offshore.

Originally named the Luva field, it is located well within the Arctic circle, 350 km (218 miles) from any kind of oil and gas infrastructure. “This is in a frontier area, where we need to develop all the necessary infrastructure from scratch,” said Thomas Bjorn Thommesen, Statoil’s vice president and project director for the development, speaking at the event in Madrid.

After the project was sanctioned in December 2012, construction work started this month with first steel cut for the spar’s hull in South Korea on 15 April.

Aasta Hansteen is estimated to contain up to 48 Bcm (1.649 Tcf) of sweet, dry gas and the area includes the Hakland and Snefrid South discoveries, as well as the Asterix discovery made in 2009.

Statoil became operator of the area in 2006, and its project partners are OMV and ConocoPhillips.

Emphasizing the challenges of developing this field in a water depth of 1,300 m (4,264 ft), Thommesen further pointed out the sub-zero seabed temperatures there, and that 10-year storm scenarios experienced in the Gulf of Mexico are seen at Aasta Hansteen’s location every year. “We have to design equipment to handle a different environmental loading and plan for shorter installation windows,” Thommesen said.

The spar, with a displacement of 156,000 tonnes, will be equipped with gas processing for up to 23 MMcm/d (811 MMcf/d) and provide 157,000 bbl of condensate storage – the first spar in the world with condensate storage. “We will have offloading of condensate with deep sea tankers every four to six weeks, so we will not [be] as dependent on regularity as we typically are on oil fields in the North Sea,” Thommesen said.

The project will also feature a total of 12 SCRs and four umbilicals, with the spar secured via a 17-point polyester taut mooring spread, using monopile tower foundations.

Subsea, the field will feature guide-wireless xmas trees, two four-slot subsea templates, and one satellite template, an intervention and workover system, and a gas export manifold for the new 480 km (300 miles) Polarled gas export pipeline. That will have the capacity to carry 84 MMcm/d (2.96 MMcf/d) of gas to Nyhamna, where the Ormen Lange field already lands its gas. Aasta Hansteen will therefore have one of the deepest gas export pipelines in the world.

DeepOcean is supplying fibre optic cable for the project, while Aker Solutions has an EPC contract to provide control umbilicals. Technip and Hyundai are responsible for design engineering and fabrication of the spar hull and topsides. When Statoil delivered the plan for development and operation to the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy for approval in 2012, project costs were put at US $5.35 billion (NOK 32 billion).

Offshore