courtesy Statoil

Norwegian oil company Hydro has presented three design proposals for the development of Gazprom’s 3-trillion-cubic-metre gas field Shtokman in the Russian Barents Sea, judging from illustrations OilGas24.com saw Tuesday.

A spar platform, tension-leg platform and buoy concept for the field appear to have been submitted at various times by the Norwegians. Russian concepts, meanwhile, include floating liquefied natural gas barges, and Yamal area gas infrastructure is being developed.

Hydro E&P manager, Tore Torvund, would neither confirm nor deny the images shown NorShipping conference-goers were concepts presently being considered by Gazprom.

“They have been examined,” he said.

Torvund, who called the Barents-Arctic region “the last great petroleum frontier”, said sediments across the region suggested countries with commercial zones extending into the Polar areas stood a good chance of exploration success: Canada, for one, “is largely gas-bearing” in the Arctic.

“There’s no development in (Labrador, the Canadian Arctic) because it’s a long distance to market and there are technological challenges,” Torvund said of Canada. Norway’s Snoehvit gas project, due onstream later this year, is the only other arctic gas development.

Greenland offshore exploration continued apace with dry wells but consensus among explorers that “it looks a lot like the Norwegian continental shelf.

Torvund, who is picked by observers to head worldwide exploration efforts in the soon-to-combine StatoilHydro, suggested Shtokman would be developed partly because of the emptying Western Siberia oil and gas fields, and because of world hunger for energy.

“(The world) consumes one relatively large North Sea field everyday just to meet our growing appetite for energy,” he said. Statoil planners see first Shtokman production by 2014, although problems of flow-assurance over 500 kilometers of pipeline, iceberg gouging of the seabed and well-stream separation must be addressed.

According to Det Norske Veritas chief exec, Henrik Madsen, who presented Hydro’s platform drawings, any design must consider the problems of ice build-up on and against any installation. ws@oilgas24.com