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Our Arctic Neighbors: Economic crisis won’t slow down Shtokman Technical challenges faced by Barents Sea gas project are biggest obstacle to 2013 startup date set by international partnership Sarah Hurst For Petroleum News
The giant Shtokman gas field in the Barents Sea is a strategic project that will not be affected by the “stop-and-go” process that usually plagues the oil and gas industry due to global economic conditions, a representative of the Shtokman Development Co. told the Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromso, Norway, Jan. 20.
Currently, gas is scheduled to be produced at Shtokman starting in 2013 and LNG in 2014, but this depends on whether the necessary technology and equipment can be made ready in time, Herve Madeo, first deputy CEO of Shtokman Development, said in his presentation. The company, which is registered in Switzerland, is a partnership between Gazprom (51 percent), Total (25 percent) and StatoilHydro (24 percent).
Shtokman, in the Russian part of the Barents Sea, will be developed in three phases because of its size. It is expected to produce 23.7 billion cubic meters of gas per year, which is the equivalent of 400,000 barrels of oil per day, Madeo said. It will require one of the biggest semisubmersible drilling rigs in the world, which has to be ice resistant, and will have a topside weight of about 40,000 tons, compared with a typical weight of 20,000-25,000 tons, he added.
“The flare size, the emergency and evacuation rescue, it’s a big challenge,” Madeo said. “Shtokman trunk line, it’s a huge trunk line; it will be a two-phase flow. … And regarding the LNG plant, at 7.5 million tons per year, it’s also one of the biggest in the world, and it has to be built in the Teriberka area — I mean in the middle of nowhere.”
Teriberka is a village on the Barents Sea coast in Russia’s Murmansk Oblast. The region has no infrastructure or oil and gas support industry, Madeo noted.
The Shtokman field is 370 miles offshore, which makes logistics another technical challenge, Madeo said. The rig will regularly have to accommodate 200 people and sometimes up to 350, who will be flown out by helicopter. It will be the first floating rig able to produce in pack ice conditions, he added, and will have to function in temperatures of minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. There is twice as much snow in the region as there is at Sakhalin in Russia’s Far East, and sea water splash and atmospheric icing conditions are also difficult.
Icebergs a big hazard Icebergs will be a big hazard at Shtokman, with 15 icebergs observed in 2003. Two of those weighed more than 3 million tons, making them too large to be tugged away, Madeo said. In the past 48 years, 220 icebergs have been observed in the Shtokman area. Even more sinister is the threat of a “rubble-berg” embedded in the sea ice — ice containing chunks of rubble. Shtokman Development has been working on a system to detect rubble-bergs, but so far has been unable to do so, Madeo said.
The company has recently decided that the drilling rig will be a ship-shaped Floating Production Unit rather than a spar, which is moored to the seabed. It has to be disconnectable in case of emergency, which is one of the most difficult challenges the project faces, according to Madeo.
“I mean, from a technology point of view, you can imagine that we have to produce 70 million standard cubic meters a day, and then we have to decide to disconnect in the proper way, to disconnect the system,” Madeo said.
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