Gullfaks Oil field - Research Paper Example

Oil exploration in the location where Gullfaks main field occupies started after the discovery of Brent Field in 1971. Hence, revealing the prospects of occurrence of Middle Jurassic Brent group sentiments, which are significant and highly rich hydrocarbon reservoirs. The first licensing that saw inception of drilling was in 1978 whereby the first well (34/10-1) managed to go through Jurassic section and encountered approximately 160 m width of oil-filled Brent sandstones region. This comprised of a column, which extends to the basement of Brent Group.

Other four wells that followed the initial well were 34/10-3, -4, -5 and -6 whose respective locations are in the western region. The main operator of this field is Statoil, which took over its full operations in 1981 turning it to be the third largest state’s field located in the Northern Sea whose capacity was twice that of Angola (Vassiliou, 2009). Since, then up to date the field stand in the Norwegian history as the first oil reserve developed and managed by one of the state’s corporations successfully.

This is to the extent of Norway becoming the third net oil exporter in 2001 whereby its yield reached approximately 223,000 bpd in 2002. The location of main field lies at 34/10 block in the Northern Norwegian Sea, whereby after exploration the main operator (Statoil) spearheaded development of other three key concrete platforms, which are Gullfaks A, Gullfaks B, Gullfaks C respectively (Statoil, 2013). Licensing Authority Statoil acts as the main operator due to its big number of shares though there are other partners whose holdings are as per the table below.

Table 1: Gullfaks Licensing authorities Partners Shares % Statoil 51 Petoro 30 OMV 19 Recently, Statoil in quest to advance and increase its yield in platform C has decided to offer a two-year contract to Aibel whose aim is to initiate varied modifications that will guarantee the field’s anticipated production (Stavanger, 2010). Mainly, Aibel will foresee connection of Pandora satellite to Platform C whereby this is one of the first projects the operator intends to undertake besides other varied tasks meant to advance the entire field facilities (Stavanger, 2010).

In addition, Statoil in order to be effective and neutralize immense competition globally has recently decided to sell 19% of its holdings to OMV, whereby its operations were to commence in 1st January this year (Oil & Gas Eurasia, 2013). Oil and Gas processing facilities The field comprises of three distinct processing facilities commonly referred as platforms whereby A and C performs are independent of each other besides having three separation stages (Statoil, 2013). Mainly, these platforms include Gullfaks A, Gullfaks B, Gullfaks C whose operations started in 1986, 1988 and 1989 respectively (Statoil,