Honeywell to power remote operation for Statoil's Valemon field

OSLO -- Honeywell has announced that it has been selected by Statoil, the international energy company headquartered in Norway, to deploy its Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS) and Honeywell Distributed System Architecture (DSA) at Statoil's Valemon platform in the North Sea. The DSA will allow Honeywell to integrate Experion with Statoil's existing Kvitebjørn platform to enable remote command of the facility, aiming to reduce overall costs and lowering the risks associated with resource recovery.

The Valemon field is located 160 km west of the Norwegian coast and is one of Statoil's largest development projects. The site contains recoverable reserves of 26 billion cubic meters of gas and five million cubic meters of condensate, which equates to over 1% of Norway's gas reserves.

Honeywell's Integrated Control and Safety System (ICSS) means work can be continuously controlled and the safety of subsea and topside operations monitored without the need for personnel on site. The entire operation can be operated remotely from the existing Kvitebjørn platform. Honeywell's technology reduces the investments needed to achieve the goal of an unmanned platform as minor additional equipment and minimum engineering is required. The DSA will minimize production costs and increase safety for Statoil personnel, as well as reduce the risk of otherwise duplicated ICSS databases becoming inconsistent over time.

Orhan Genis, vice president, sales, Honeywell Process Solutions, EMEA, commented: "The use of Honeywell DSA and PKS technologies at Valemon demonstrates the industry's recent step forward in resource recovery. The ability to work remotely is opening up the possibility of extracting large untapped reserves in locations, such as the deep North Sea, that were previously too difficult, distant or dangerous to reach, while also helping to drive down costs and increase efficiency."

With production planned to begin in 2014, the gas extracted from the Valemon field will be sent via existing pipelines to supply European gas consumers. Samsung Heavy Industries is acting as the Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contractor for the project.