Norwegian offshore safety watchdog, the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA), has granted Statoil consent to use the Huldra platform in the North Sea during its cold phase.
PSA said on Friday that the consent applies to the use of the platform after the wells have been plugged and abandoned, casings removed and the platform permanently shut down.
To remind, the platform went offline on September 3, 2014, and all six wells at Huldra were plugged by the jack-up rig West Epsilon during 2016.
The Huldra field is a Statoil-operated gas and condensate field on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, North East of Bergen which came on stream in November 2001. It is located north of the Oseberg field in a water depth of 125 meters. The field was developed using a wellhead platform including a processing facility and was remotely controlled from Veslefrikk B.
The platform itself has an interesting history since it was, at one point, put up for sale by Statoil on a Norwegian advertising website with a sales pitch that said: “Well kept 20 bedroom platform for sale. Panorama sea view and plenty of room for a helicopter. Only your imagination limits what it can be used for.”
At the time, one of the potential buyers of the ’20 bedroom platform’ was ConocoPhillips which planned to re-use the Huldra platform topsides on a new steel jacket with a tie-in to the Ekofisk complex for the development of its Tommeliten Alpha license. However, the deal never came to be as ConocoPhillips reportedly shelved the Tommeliten development project in March 2015.
The Huldra platform will be removed by Heerema Marine Contractors during 2019 with the subsequent disposal and recycling work taking place at AF Offshore Decom’s environmental base in Vats, Norway within the first half of 2020.
Offshore Energy Today Staff