The Shtokman Development Company, comprising Gazprom, Statoil Hydro and Total, is planning three development stages, each with subsea production complexes.
Phase one involves three subsea templates and 20 wells, plus associated flowlines and risers, and the surface processing and ice-resistant platform.
This field concept is to be repeated for phases two and three, and helicopter transport to the field’s facilities will have to be backed up by a transitory platform for refueling aircraft.
“If helicopters have to have a reserve to come back, it is 1,200km (750 miles) so we will probably have to build an intermediate platform,” Madeo disclosed during the MCE (Marine Construction Europe) Deepwater Development conference organised by Quest Offshore in Paris in association with Total.
From the field location, the 550km (340-mile) offshore export pipeline will run to Teriberka, 110km (70 miles) east of Murmansk, where a terminal will be developed to produce 23.7billion cu m of gas a year – nearly 70million cu m a day.
This will be piped to Vyborg and into the new Nord Stream gas system, together with 7.5million tonnes a year of LNG, by 2014.
Madeo is under no illusions about the challenges that his company faces, saying they were both human, technical and logistical, and all related to planning and controlling the huge project.
Offshore construction will be restricted to just two ice-free months of the year, and the onshore site at Teriberka – based on images Madeo presented in Paris – currently looks barren and inhospitable.
Meanwhile, Russia’s ministry of natural resources has declared that all future oil&gas developments on the Russian Continental Shelf are to be granted to government-owned Gazprom and Rosneft only.
Yuri Trutnev, minister of natural resources, said all licences for gas-prone blocks offshore Russia would be allocated to Gazprom, and oil-prone acreage would go to Rosneft.
Trutnev said there would be no auctions or tenders involved, sending a clear signal to western IOCs that the door is shut.
Russia’s entire continental shelf from the Barents and Black Seas to the Pacific Ocean will fall under this new regime, but not the Caspian as it is managed by agreements with Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
This new licensing policy becomes law when signed by Russia’s president. It was approved by the Duma in April in a package that included restrictions on foreign investment in strategic sectors, including Russia’s main oil&gas reserves, and establishes new subsoil and offshore laws.
Rosneft’s president, Sergei Bogdanchikov, told the Duma that the development of Russia’s offshore oil reserves demanded investment in the order of $2.61trillion through to 2050, of which some $685billion would be expended on exploration alone. $1.93trillion was earmarked for development and more than $135billion for offshore mobile drilling units, he said.