Norwegian oil and gas safety body, the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA), has found a non-conformity during an audit of Statoil’s PP&A of wells at the Statfjord A field in the North Sea.
PSA said on Friday that the audit of planning and execution of permanent plugging and abandonment (PP&A) at Statfjord A was conducted between May 11 and June 10, 2016.
The objective of the audit was to document that the company’s established process and plans for permanent plugging of the wells at Statfjord A comply with the regulations.
Statoil has divided wells on Statfjord A in three groups and has already plugged multiple wells and well trajectories in group one and two.
PSA said that it found one non-conformity relating to the risk assessment for leaks from old well trajectories and that it has informed Statoil that the deadline to report on how the non-conformity will be dealt with is September 22.
Statfjord field was discovered by Mobil in 1974, and Statoil took over the operatorship on January 1, 1987. The field has been developed with the Statfjord A, B and C production platforms, which all have concrete gravity base structures incorporating storage cells. Statfjord A began production on 24 November 1979.
The field is located on the border of the Norwegian and UK parts of the North Sea with shares of the field in both areas. The Norwegian share of the field lies in blocks 33/9 and 33/12 in production license 037, while the British part is in the UK block 211/25 in licenses 104 and 293. Statfjord is one of the oldest producing fields on the Norwegian Continental Shelf and the largest oil discovery in the North Sea.
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