Norway’s offshore safety watchdog, the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA), has given Statoil consent to change contingency planning at the Halten-Nordland area in the Norwegian Sea.
The PSA said on Thursday that the contingency planning changes were in connection with the development of Statoil’s Aasta Hansteen field.
Namely, the Norwegian oil major applied for consent to change the established area contingency planning for the area which involves cooperation on emergency preparedness between several facilities and fields with the aim of sharing maritime and airborne emergency response resources.
These resources may include one or more emergency response vessels and search and rescue (SAR) helicopters.
As for the Aasta Hansteen development, the reason for the contingency planning changes, it is situated at a depth of 1,300 meters in the Vøring area, 300 kilometers from land. The field is operated by Statoil with Wintershall, OMV, and ConocoPhillips as partners.
The field will be developed using a spar platform which will be Norway’s first in production. Spar is a cylindrical, partially submerged offshore drilling and production platform that is particularly well adapted to deepwater.
In early July , Statoil began upending operations on the massive Aasta Hansteen spar substructure. After the operation was completed, only 40 meters of the 200-meter-long substructure stood above the sea level.
The substructure for the world’s largest spar platform was built by Hyundai Heavy Industries in Ulsan, South Korea. The 46,000-tonne structure is not the only part of the platform being built by HHI as the company is in charge of building the topsides as well.
When the entire platform is completed, it will be towed to the Norwegian Sea and the Aasta Hansteen field during 2018.