I flew from Chicago to Helsinki and then to Copenhagen, where ABB had laid on a charter flight to Alta, Norway. From Alta, we took a bus, stopping for herds of reindeer crossing the highway all along the way, to Hammerfest. By then, I'd been up about 30 hours and I crashed even though there was no darkness-we were truly in the land of the midnight sun..
The next morning, we went through a long undersea tunnel to Melkøya Island, in the fjord off Hammerfest for briefings and a tour of the plant.
Snøhvit is the first offshore development in the Barents Sea. Without surface installations, this project involves bringing natural gas to land for liquefaction and export from the first plant of its kind in Europe and the world's northernmost liquefied natural gas facility.
Arctic LNG supplies from Snøhvit provide new opportunities for Statoil in the US gas market. Snøhvit is the first major development on the Norwegian continental shelf with no surface installations.
The seabed facilities are designed to be over-trawlable, so that neither they nor fishing equipment will suffer any damage from coming into contact. No fixed or floating unitsare positioned in the Barents Sea.A total of nine wells are planned on Snøhvit, including eight for production and one for injecting carbon dioxide back below ground. Six of the producers and the carbon dioxide injector were drilled during 2004-05, with the remaining two following in 2011.
In addition, the production wells were drilled on Albatross in 2005-06. This field also forms part of the Snøhvit development. The Snøhvit and Albatross wells came on stream in 2007. The Askeladd part of the development is not due to come on stream until 2014-15.
The carbon dioxide injection pipeline Statoil's website mentions above is so that the LNG plant can have a vastly reduced carbon footprint. Instead of releasing the CO2 as most facilities do, The Melkøya facility is designed to capture the carbon and re-inject it into the well field. This will cut the plant's carbon emissions by at least half over a normal LNG plant.
This necessitated the plant being built very compactly-perhaps too compactly, but it works. Nilsen noted that this gave Statoil enough real estate on the island to make two more plants of the same size. "We have lots of expansion room," he said.
We then suited up and did a full scale tour of the plant. The plant includes field devices from many vendors, including Siemens and Endress+Hauser, but the control system is all ABB System 800xA. One of the interesting things was the large collection of fish swimming in the plant water intake, including flounder and other food fishes. Lunchtime fishing must be pretty good!
Øivind Nilsen talked about what arctic gas means to Statoil in terms of new markets and revenues. He noted that if the planet continues to warm, the Northeast Passage is expected to open up all the way from Hammerfest to Vladivostok, and then to Japan and China. Shipping LNG that way will be faster and cheaper than going through the Suez or Panama Canals, or around the horn. Even though the prices for natural gas are low in the United States currently, Nilsen sees the US as a fertile market in the future.
We got carted off to Hammerfest to participate in the grand opening of ABB's new offices, complete with first rate cellist and the Lord Mayor of Hammerfest, wearing his gold chain of office. Then we went to Mikkelgammen (www.mikkelgammen.no) for an evening of eating reindeer, which was really very good. It tasted like elk (of course it would) which I have eaten before. The host sang us some shamanistic chants and talked about the Sami (which we used to call Lapplanders) and their way of life and culture, and following the reindeer migrations.
The next morning we arose at what here would be O Dark Thirty, but which on June 21st, the Summer Solstice, was still daylight (and had been all night). We walked down to the pier and took the Hurtigruten (www.hurtigruten.us) cruise ship for a short cruise to Honningsvåg. This is a small cruise ship cum ferry boat, and we sailed up and around the top of Norway to Honningsvåg, which is nearly walking distance to Russia. The weather was bad, the seas were somewhat rough, but standing on the bow of the ship looking at the scenery must be experienced. The other passengers, mostly elderly people on a fancy cruise, were wondering what the heck we were doing, especially since we took over the ship's movie theater for the morning and they were all annoyed that they couldn't watch the movie that had been scheduled.
After disembarking at Honningsvåg, we trooped to the tour bus and took the long drive back to Alta, where the charter flight took us back to Copenhagen. I stayed the night in Copenhagen and then flew back to the US the next morning.
Statoil, helped by ABB, is doing some extremely innovative work in subsea exploration and drilling, and in extraction of natural gas. The HVDC and carbon dioxide return lines alone are nearly unique, and the completely underwater gas well installations are very forward looking and environmentally friendly. With complete subsea installations, the chances of a blowout like Deepwater Horizon are vastly reduced.