Oil company Statoil has received consent from the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) to drill an exploration well in the Barents Sea, off Norway, with the Songa Enabler drilling rig.
According to the PSA’s statement on Thursday, the company has received consent to drill the exploration well 7121/8-1 in production license 849, in a prospect named Blåmann.
The Blåmann drill site is in 376 meters of water, around 113 kilometers north-west of Hammerfest and 25 kilometers from Goliat.
The drilling work is scheduled to take 25 days and the consent also covers drilling of a possible sidetrack, with the designation 7171/8-1A, which will take 13 days. The well is to be drilled by Songa Enabler, which is a semi-submersible drilling rig of the Cat D type.
The operations will start once the rig is done drilling on the Snøhvit field.
To remind, after being suspended last December, the Songa Enabler returned to work earlier than expected to drill a production well at the Statoil-operated Snøhvit field in the Barents Sea. The operations were scheduled to start in mid-March and last for 65 days.
While on its way to the Snøhvit field, the rig was in late February intercepted by activists from Greenpeace Nordic and Greenpeace Germany protesting against Statoil and the Norwegian government for opening up a new oil frontier in the Arctic.
The rig was delivered by the Daewoo yard in South Korea in 2016. It is registered in Norway and classified by DNV-GL.
Songa Offshore received Acknowledgement of Compliance (AoC) for the facility from the PSA in July 2016.
Offshore Energy Today Staff