Statfjord still going strong
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Nobody thought at first that Statfjord would pay. But so far it has pumped out more than NOK 1,200 billion and—thanks to ever better technology—its closure has been postponed time and again.
Statfjord A stands like a rust-red, brown and yellow giant sunning itself in a calm sea, and looking worthy of its nickname as “the Old Greek”.
Celebrated by a sign reading “El greco international” in the arrival hall, this tag refers to the Greek shipowners who bought rusty old tankers from Norway and kept them going. And three full drilling crews are actually at work on the Statfjord field for the first time in more than 20 years, because crude continues to be squeezed out of Norway’s biggest oil field.
“I can remember newspaper headlines about cost overruns and predictions that this project would be a fiasco,” recalls Jarl Nystrand. A process technician on Statfjord A, he was a member of the first team of production workers recruited in 1976 to work on the platform.
“There was crticism, and questions were asked in the early years,” he says. “But the investment paid for itself after just one year, and the critics fell silent.”
When Nystrand started his Statfjord A career, the shafts of the platform’s concrete gravity base structure (GBS) were lying just outside Stavanger and the topsides were being fabricated at Stord. He followed the structure from its infancy, accompanied it out to the North Sea and continued when production began in 1979—and has stayed ever since.
Statfjord is now being converted with the aid of known technology from an oil field containing some associated gas to a gas field also holding a little crude. Equipment being used includes electrical submersible pumps (ESPs) positioned down the well, which are normally used to bring up oil—as on Equinor-operated Peregrino off Brazil. On Statfjord, however, they will remove water in order to reduce reservoir pressure. Once the latter reaches the boiling point of oil, gas is liberated from the crude.