Legendary Ormen Lange comes ashore
  from: Offshore Engineer
  by: Darius Snieckus
  Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Discovered ten years ago almost 3000m below sea level off Norway, the NKr66 billion Ormen Lange field has emerged as a history-making development that continues to transform many of the international E&P;industry’s engrained attitudes and approaches toward deepwater oil and gas production. As the pioneering subsea-to-beach project steams toward start-up on 1 October, Darius Snieckus looks back over the field’s development and speaks with Hydro project director Tom Røtjer about technology development, contractor markets, and the long-term future of this ‘seafloor trendsetter’.

Unnoticed by many outside the oil and gas world, on 19 July production well A2 became the first to be opened and cleaned on the Ormen Lange field, erecting a penultimate milestone as Europe’s largest offshore development heads for home in the final hook-up and commissioning period before start-up next month 120km off the coast of Møre, mid-Norway. All going according to plan, the inaugural well will soon be joined by a further two as the first plank in production from the 400bcm-plus gas and condensate development, with each forecast to be delivering up to 10 million m³ of gas by the time they are handed over to operations crews next month. Once flowing at full spate in water depths of 850-1100m, the field’s two dozen large-bore deepwater producers will be pumping 70 million m³/d of gas and 504,000b/d of condensate to the Nyhamna processing facility and on, 1200km across the Norwegian and North seas to Easington, England, ready – as one of development operator Hydro’s publicity campaigns envisions it – to heat the homes and kettles of 10 million Britons.

Ormen Lange has captured the popular imagination in a way few offshore oil and gas projects have or arguably ever will. Beyond the endless column inches occupied by description and discussion of the field development in the industry trades, business magazines, broadsheets and tabloids, the NKr66 billion project has been featured on television channels as diverse as National Geographic, the Discovery Channel and Arabic language satellite station Al-Jazeera. As one of the clever marketing images dreamt up by Hydro’s Ormen Lange communications department depicts it, the project is a 500,000,000 piece scale model of gigantic yellow industrial hardware in mid-hoist, spider-like trenching machines moonwalking through air, helicopters a-hover, and a fleet of heavyweight marine construction vessels on the move, all under the command of a man with blue hardhat and a walkie-talkie. It is an image every man and boy – and many women and girls – is drawn to instantly.

Ten years after its discovery via well 6305/5-1, Ormen Lange exists in the superlative. Not least because it is in fact three world-scale projects in one: the offshore development, the onshore processing facility, and the Langeled trunkline.

Set atop a reservoir of sand-rich turbidities of late Cretaceous and early Tertiary origin that covers an area of 359km² some 2913m below sea level is the beating heart of phase one of the field, two eight-slot subsea templates with manifolds, eight Christmas trees, control systems, intervention system, tie-in tools, as well as end terminations and Tees for the development’s twin subsea-to-shore gas lines, all delivered by FMC under a NKr1 billion deal signed in late-2003. Five 9 5/8in big bore wells will be ready for production this year, with Seadrill’s West Navigator – which began production drilling in November 2005 – pressing ahead to put in a further four in 2008. From start-up, Ormen Lange’s output will be stepped up year-on-year from 30 million m³/d to 50 million m³/d to reach its full-fed plateau level of 70 million m³/d in 2009, by which time the planned 24 wells will be complete.

Installed 4km apart on the field’s main 40km long x 8-10km wide production area by Heerema’s Thialf construction barge in a dual crane lift, the two 1150t 42m x 26m x 12m templates are tied back with rigid spools to a pair of 30in multiphase lines, interconnected via a pipeline end termination system. They are operated by two main control umbilicals linking the onshore plant to the subsea productions system, with a crossover control umbilical bridging the two templates to provide redundant hydraulic supply to all subsea wells.

Shoreward from out of sub-zero waters wellfluids will – to start – travel under their own steam up what is arguably the most tortuous layroute ever attempted on an offshore development. Courtesy of the Storrega slide, a vast talus of rock and seabed created 8100 years ago that features boulders and slide rocks up to 60m tall, the twin export lines have had to be threaded through the ‘lunar’ landscape and up a 40° incline to landfall. Long in advance of the pipelay operations, Hydro translated conceptual studies based on surface survey data into a stepwise programme of seabed mapping – built up from multibeam echo (MBE) sounder shoots from surface vessels, AUVs and ROVs – and soil investigations that made it possible to sketch out feasible routes before carrying out detailed engineering that formalised a final layroute to Nyhamna.

Over three seasons, Ormen Lange’s pipeline and umbilical infrastructure has taken shape. In 2005, the 30in lines, together with the northern half of the 42in Langeled trunkline, were pulled in at Nyhamna and laid out using Allseas’ fourth generation pipelay vessel Solitaire, to complete the 33km nearshore portion of the laydown. A year later, the installation moved up a gear for the most demanding period of activity, as no fewer than 15 vessels from nine contractors navigated the field adding the hydrate-preventing 6in MEG lines (using the Acergy Falcon), some 120km of umbilicals (using the Skandi Neptune), and the 64km shallow water stretch of the 30in lines’ layroute (Allseas’ Solitaire), the last lowered into a 5m wide trench dug by Nexans’ Spider remotely operated dredging machine with touchdown monitoring by MBE. Saipem’s giant S7000 pipelay vessel, following rendezvous with Solitaire and pipeline retrieval, J-laid the 30in line along its final 26km to Ormen Lange to be linked up with the PLET. The larger spools connecting the pipelines to the subsea production templates were here wetparked from the S7000, and lifted into place and tied in using the Norman Cutter.

Seafloor trendsetter

Stack up the monumental challenges facing Ormen Lange at the outset – extreme seabed typography, ultraharsh environmental conditions, deep water and turbulent currents, along with the long distance between field reservoir and onshore processing facility – and the need for a well-crafted and closely managed technology development plan becomes plain.

The programme adopted by the field partners finished up including descriptions of the new technologies required, a plan for implementation, the probability of success, and a fallback strategy. Ultimately covering areas including development of a wet gas meter (designed by Roxar); increased allowable pipeline freespans; a new pipeline tie-in system, a remotely operated pipeline repair system; new seabed dredging equipment; MEG dosage valves, and a tubing retrievable subsurface safety valve, the scheme was run in parallel with the project execution timeline to ensure the primary objectives would match that of the development as whole, particularly with regards to quality assurance, planning, verifications, risk assessment, and documentation.

‘We approached this business of technology development in a straightforward manner: first, indentify what is needed, what had to be developed and what would have to be state-of-the-art,’ states Hydro project director Tom Røtjer. ‘Much of the technology used on Ormen Lange was not strictly new technology but we certainly stretched the capabilities of a lot of this technology. And often it was the case that we needed most of all to scale up the size of the technology – the templates, the trees, the pipelines, everything is huge on Ormen Lange, so that all required qualification.’

‘It is one thing that is very good about the offshore industry: so long as you know what the challenge is, you can basically solve it,’ he adds. ‘The greater challenge comes when you don’t know what you are trying to solve until you get under way.’ Laying the twin 30in pipelines between the field and the plant at Nyhamna is an area Røtjer singles out as taking ‘a great deal of energy and effort’ partly because Hydro and Nexans were developing the Spider steep terrain dredger – a system adapted from a forest logging machine – to level the seabed by a combination of water jetting and suction to remove large volumes of soil using a dredging head on an extendable arm to cover the operational area.

‘Considering the use of new technologies together with large volumes and associated costs, developing, choosing and optimising between the different seabed preparation methods have shown themselves to be of great importance,’ he notes.

Along with proactive pinpointing of the technologies that would demanded by Ormen Lange, Hydro also went to great lengths early on to feel out the contractor market and likely tolerances of the supply chain. The overall strategy for the development was fleshed out in 2002/03 based on the principle that the contracting sector – ‘major value creators’ – must be used ‘in an optimum way’, with due consideration given to limitations within certain market areas and monitoring of market capacity from the first.

‘We made a point of being highly interactive with the supplier market,’ underlines Røtjer. ‘We told the market what we would be after – to get them mobilised a little – and tried to make the most of those established relationships with had with various main contractors, including FMC of course. Transparency regarding our requirements was key.’

With the constraints of the contracting market changing radically over the course of Ormen Lange’s development, Røtjer reckons Hydro was ‘a little lucky’ in not feeling more of a pinch as the project progressed. ‘When it came to Langeled, for instance, there were issues of steel supply and laying capacity and we had gone out to market very early on this aspect of the project – in 2003, long before Ormen Lange was sanctioned. If we tried to do the same today it would be nearly double the price. And as to the rest of Ormen Lange, we signed off on our main contracts just before this latest boom got going. I would like to say we were clever, but it feels more like luck.’

‘Good contracts’, he offers, those that take into account ‘both our desire for the best price and best quality and the contractor’s desire to earn money’ have kept the project on track. ‘Fair compensation for fair work has to be the way it is,’ Røtjer states.

Eyes wide open from the very start as to just how complex a project Ormen Lange would necessarily be, he reflects, has meant ‘everything – technology development, budgetary management, procurement strategy, risk management – has had to be kept under very tight control’.

Developed among the daffodils

Aerial photographs taken of the Island of Gossen before the civil engineering crews arrived three years ago to begin construction of the Ormen Lange gas processing plant show a flat, remote island typical of many on the west coast of Norway, where the main industries are shipbuilding, fisheries, and salmon hatcheries – along with the tourism brought in by the millions of daffodils that carpet the islet every spring. What stands at Nyhamna now has transformed the landscape. The facility, which is spread over a 4.3km area, has been built to handle wellstream processing, gas export compression, and condensate offloading to tankers. Gas is conditioned to dew point and heating value according to European specifications here, metered, and routed on into the Langeled trunkline; condensate recovered from the wellstream is stabilised and stored in a custom-made 180,000m³ rock cavern beneath the plant – known as the ‘mountain halls’ – before being shipped from the terminal. Plans are for the Nyhamna facility to eventually serve as a ‘gas hub’ for a large swathe of output from the Norwegian shelf ’s current and future offshore field developments.

As a greenfield project occupying a large part of the island, the onshore plant was engineered with ‘aesthetic, geotechnical, and geological considerations’ in mind to maintain existing landscape features and limit the facility’s visual and noise impact. Site preparation work has included replacement of some 1.5 million m3 or soil and 2.2 million m3 of rock-blasting for tunnels and caverns. Reconnaissance surveys have also been carried out to identify suitable areas for further development of the facility, not least a ‘special area’ for the planned test site for a new subsea compression station to be piloted a few years from now. Designed for 30-year lifetime, the main infrastructure elements have been made to last at least 50 years in light of the fact that Ormen Lange alone should flow well beyond 2037.

Construction at Nyhamna has been divided into two main contracts. One, a NKr7.8 billion deal with Aker Stord covering engineering, construction and installation of the processing facility. The other, a NKr1.1 billion agreement with Vetco Aibel encompassing project engineering, procurement and building of the dock facilities for export of condensate, together with a VOC facility – for recycling hydrocarbon gases that form when during condensate loading – and overseeing all mechanical installation in the mountain halls and building of roads and infrastructure in the condensate export area at Nyhamna. Designed to process 70 million m3/d and an arrival pressure of 90 bar at peak, in 5-7 years this capacity will be reduced to meet falling reservoir pressure. Capacity can also be opened up to 84 million m³/d by debottlenecking the utility and gas processing systems and installing a fourth gas export compressor.

As monoethylene glycol injection is the primary hydrate remedial measure at Ormen Lange, an MEG recycling system made up of a treatment plant and 27,000m³ storage tank were built to answer the environmental and economic demands of the field development. Testing of the MEG processing system, delivered by Vetco Aibel under a second deal inked with Hydro in 2005, is today in the final stages.

All in, construction of the Ormen Lange gas processing plant has so far involved more than 12 million man-hours, 3500 workers representing 54 nationalities, and investment from the project partners of something in the region of NKr18.5 billion. Testimony to the overall HSE culture of Ormen Lange, where 27,000 ‘safety observations’ have been reported, the onshore construction project’s record, according to Røtjer, has been ‘remarkably good, especially when you consider you have thousands of people in rotation working on a site where they have never been before – and speaking many different languages’. HSE performance at Nyhamna was ‘just behind’ that offshore.

‘The long and winding road’

Translated from the Norwegian as ‘the long and winding road’, few names could be more apt for Ormen Lange’s export pipeline, at 1200km the longest subsea line on the face of the planet. Some 20bcm/yr will flow through the two-leg line, the 42in diameter northern stretch of which will join Nyhamna to the Sleipner riser platform, situated near the Norway-UK maritime boundary, and the 44in southern part which will transport Ormen Lange gas the remainder of the way to Easington, on the east coast of England, where it will cleaned, measured and adjusted to meet pressure and temperature conditions required for further transport through the UK’s National Transmission System.

Project managed by Statoil, pipelay of Langeled began in April 2005 with joints being welded and lowered out to the seabed by Stolt’s LB200 laybarge (now the Acergy Piper). The 525km southern leg was completed in time for first gas to begin flowing into the UK receiving terminal on 1 October 2006 – although the laybarge needed a three-week break for repairs at the end of the assignment following a collision with an anchor-handling tug on the approach to Sleipner, the Solitaire coming in to assist in the completion work.

Preparing the landfall back on the UK shore, meanwhile, had been a demanding business due to the local coastline’s 30mhigh erosion prone cliffs: under the supervision of main landfall works contractor Jan de Nul, a short-curved 380m tunnel was dredged from a cofferdam at the beachhead to the new receiving facilities and erosion protection installed in areas outside the terminals.

Though a late start was made to laying of the northern, Nyhamna-Sleipner leg due to the Solitaire being held up on a job in the US Gulf, the Acergy Piper managed to make up time to see that the line between Sleipner and Nyhamna was in by October 2006. The northern leg – which with an internal pressure of 250 bar is the highest of any NCS pipeline – is currently in the throes of final commissioning.

Planning for the future

Much as all eyes at Ormen Lange continue to be trained on first flow next month, the future of the field is exercising many minds behind the scenes at Hydro too. In March, the field partners set the seal on plans to spend NKr2.5 billion to size up the possibility of installing a subsea compression station to boost production from the development starting in 2015. A full-scale pilot project, to be carried out in a testing pool on the Nyhamna site, aims to qualify the technology inside four years. Should the project prove a success – and only an Ormen Lange-size development could breathe life into technology this costly – the field partners will be able to install a subsea installation made up of four compressor trains that weighs just 3500t, rather than a 25,000t platform.

‘It is rare that a development project has this much funding available for qualifying new technology,’ suggests Røtjer, ‘but then again this is a solution which will mean a great step forward for the oil industry. And in fact you need a project the scale of Ormen Lange to make available a budget of the size needed to develop such a subsea compression system.’ Aker Kvaerner was chosen last summer as EPC contractor for the pilot unit, while Vetco Aibel will deliver the long step-out power supply for the compression station.

The other major recent advance at Ormen Lange has come with the decision taken by the field partners this summer to push ahead with long-gestating plans for the so-called Southern development, a further NKr1.2 billion in contracts have now gone out to a quartet of contractors.

Saipem has won the job of installing the development’s 1150t, eight-slot template, to take place in the second quarter of 2009; Nexans has been awarded the EPC assignment for the umbilical system, with installation slated for summer 2009; and Reinertsen has been tapped to provide detailed engineering for the two 16in production lines that will connect the new template to the existing Ormen Lange infrastructure, along with that for a 6in MEG line and an umbilical. FMC Kongsberg has landed the biggest fish of the lot, however: an EPC NKr1 billion order for six subsea trees, an eight-slot manifold with protection structures, related control systems and four pipeline end modules with connection equipment, deliveries for which will kick off early 2009.

‘You take the Ormen Lange project – and it is three projects really, the offshore development, the onshore processing plant and the pipeline – and it is something that is world-class and very international and by its scale and dimension almost strange,’ concludes Røtjer, ‘and yet I can talk to my neighbour about it. There is something very accessible about it too.’ There will probably never be another project like it.

As a subsea-to-beach development bristling with the best and brightest technology available today offshore, Ormen Lange is opening horizons for the oil and gas industry at large in the nearterm. Yet the impact of what has become Norway’s largest-ever industrial project appears destined to resonate far beyond the shores of Scandinavia.

As Hydro’s Russia business unit head Bengt Lie Hansen underscored at a recent conference in Norway, the role of the world’s northern areas in meeting future global energy demand is growing. The large-reserve fields that will be lynchpins to this supply will include such high-profile long step-out Arctic developments such as Shtokman off Russia. And, as Hansen justly pointed out, ‘Ormen Lange is the foremost reference project and source of experience for ensuring that Shtokman becomes a reality’. In the mists of Norse mythology, Ormen Lange was a giant serpent that girdled the waters surrounding the Viking lands; the subseato- beach development that was named Ormen Lange a decade ago might just prove to be of like eminence to the international energy supply and demand balance in years to come. OE

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