Hans Kristiansen, Statoil's project manager for Tordis, Karen Kaasa, chief executive of Nøtterøy municipality south of Oslo, Margareth Øvrum, Statoil's executive vice president for Technology & Projects and Ann-Kristin Gjerdseth, FMC's project manager, named Tordis. (Photo: Tor Aas-Haug).
"This is incredibly exciting and fun to be sponsor to a subsea separator for the Tordis field," said Ms Øvrum during the naming ceremony.
"The equipment is an important breakthrough in a new generation of resource-saving and environmentally friendly technology."
During the next 15-20 years, Tordis will recover 35 million extra barrels of oil while separating out water and sand from the oil wells and pumping it directly back into the bedrock. Tordis is the first subsea installation to do this job on the seabed without the need for energy intensive processing on a surface platform. According to Ms Øvrum, this paves the way for exciting future prospects.
"Our subsea expertise from the Norwegian continental shelf is presently one of our greatest assets in a highly competitive international environment," she says, referring to the deepwater areas in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM).
"When the merger between Statoil and Hydro soon becomes a reality, the new Norwegian company will be one of the leading players in the GoM. We will apply our knowledge and technological strength from the Tordis project here."
Tordis technology will also make it cheaper to develop smaller fields and prolong the lifetime of existing ones. This is an important contribution to long-term value creation on the Norwegian continental shelf.
Tordis will shortly be moved from the Tønsberg yard out to the field where it will be installed in early August.
Tordis lies in block 34/7 in the Tampen area of the North Sea and came on stream in 1994. Oil from the field is piped to the Gullfaks C platform 10 kilometres away for processing, storage and export.