Norway’s Uptime International has achieved the ‘world’s first’ Statoil TRL7 proven technology approval for motion compensated gangways.
According to Uptime, TRL 7 is Statoil’s highest technology readiness level. This approval was given to the Uptime 23,4m active motion compensated gangway.
During the approval, the gangway was mounted on Island Offshore’s vessel Island Crown during a walk to work charter for Statoil.
The charter was to perform hook-up and commissioning of the unmanned wellhead platform Oseberg H for the Oseberg Vestflanken 2 development.
The company added that Island Offshore started this walk to work charter at Oseberg H in August 2017 and completed it in October 2017. During the charter, the vessel was connected to Oseberg H by the Uptime 23,4m AMC gangway, for continuous open access and evacuation purposes.
Sales and marketing director Svein Ove Haugen said: “We always strive to reach the highest possible level of safety for our Uptime product. We achieved the highest readiness level from Statoil as the first gangway provider in the world, based on our 39-year experience in the offshore walk-to-work sector.”
It is worth noting that the Oseberg H platform was installed by Statoil in August and that the platform was the company’s first unmanned wellhead platform with a topside weighing just 1,100 tonnes.
The platform is a part of the Oseberg Vestflanken 2 development. It was installed in the Norwegian part of the North Sea some eight kilometers northwest of the Oseberg Field Center.
Oseberg Vestflanken 2 is the first of three planned phases for developing the remaining reserves in the Oseberg area located some 130 kilometers northwest of Bergen. The development will consist of an unmanned wellhead platform with ten well slots with two existing subsea wells also being reused. Production start is scheduled for the second quarter of 2018 and is estimated to run until 2040.