Increases Snøhvit gas estimates
Statoil says the reserve is now believed to contain additional 20 million cubic meters.
“We have increased our understanding of the reserve and the bedrock in the area. It behaves in a different way than anticipated, which means that we are upgrading our reserve estimate,” Statoil spoksman Ola Anders Skauby told Dow Jones Newswire.
Gas from the field is pumped from the underwater installations in the Barents Sea to the Hammerfest LNG plant. The increased estimates for the field could trigger expansion of the LNG-plant or prolongation of the field’s operation-period. Another option could be to connect the gas field to a possible new underwater gas pipeline from the Barents Sea to the networks of gas pipelines between the Norwegian continental shelf in the south and Europe.
The various options on what to do with the gas are now under consideration by Statoil.
“The two options for how to increase the capacity are rather similar from an investment point of view, but have different advantages,” says Øyvind Nilsen, head of operations at Hammerfest LNG says to NRK.
Read also: Gas from Northern Norway through the Northern Sea Route
The new estimates of 20 billion cubic meters additional gas comes on top of the previous estimate of 190 billion cubic meters in the reservoirs.
The Snøhvit natural gas field started production in 2007 and Hammerfest is the world’s northernmost LNG factory.
