Third oil delivery from Arctic offshore

Russian oil and gas company Gazprom Neft has announced the third delivery of crude oil from the Prirazlomnoye field, offshore in the Pechora Sea. An ice-class oil tanker delivered the oil from the field’s concrete and steel walled platform “to consumers in northwest Europe,” Gazprom has said.

The field uses two tankers, specifically built for the Prirazlomnoye project, each with deadweights of 70,000 tonnes and using a “double action” design, in which a ship travels forward through open water but reverses through ice, with the ship’s propellers carving open the ice as necessary. According to the Offshore Technology website and other sources, the tankers ship the Prirazlomnoye oil 1,100 kilometers west to the floating Belokamenka terminal in Kola Bay, near Murmansk, in the southern Barents Sea.

Gazprom says that shipments from the field have delivered 200,000 tonnes of oil in 2014. Field production started in December 2013 from a single well - a second well should come on line at the end of 2014, with further wells planned for 2015.

The company says the design of the platform includes a safety margin that “vastly exceeds actual loads.” Prior to loading into tankers, produced oil is stored in tanks in the platform’s caisson, using a storage method that excludes air from the tanks, thereby avoiding the formation of an explosive mixture. A zero discharge system avoids the need to dump drilling and other waste into the sea, with waste either being injected into the subsurface through a disposal well, or being transported to shore, Gazprom says.

- Alan Bailey