Norwegian oil major Statoil has received consent from the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) to use the Songa Encourage rig for drilling and completing a production well on the Troll field in the North Sea.
The Troll field is around 65 kilometers west of Kollsnes in Hordaland county. It has been developed using three integrated process and accommodation platforms, Troll A, B, and C, and subsea well templates tied back to the B and C platforms.
The consent from the offshore safety body applies to the production well on the Troll field designated as 31/2-O-24.
The PSA said on Monday that the well would be drilled in a well template tied back to Troll C by a subsea pipeline. The drilling work is scheduled to take 71 days at a water depth of 338 meters.
Songa Encourage is a semi-submersible drilling rig of a Cat D type, operated by Songa Offshore. It was built at the Daewoo yard in South Korea in 2016. It is classified by DNV GL, registered in Norway, and received an acknowledgment of compliance from the PSA in April 2017.
The Troll field contains around 40 percent of the total gas reserves on the Norwegian Continental Shelf but is also among the largest oil fields on the shelf.