Heavy lifts on Visund

Two modules weighing a total of 600 tonnes were lifted onto Statoil’s Visund production floater in the Tampen area of the North Sea over the weekend.

These gas compression and export units were installed with the aid of the Thialf crane barge as part of the group’s Visund gas project.

The latter will ensure that the platform has the equipment and facilities needed to transport up to 15 million cubic metres of gas per day from the field, starting this autumn.

Gas injection capacity is also being expanded with the aid of the project in order to improve oil recovery from the Visund reservoir.

“This was a very demanding lifting operation, since the modules were being transferred from one floater to another,” says project director Morten F Krogh.

“The Visund platform was expected to experience a vertical displacement of up to four metres in connection with the module installations.

“Good weather simplified the lifts, however, and the actual effect on the floater was about 2.5 metres.”

Around 80,000 work-hours remain to be carried out on the platform, including module hook-up with existing equipment and preparing to start gas export.

In addition come installation of the export riser as well as the tie-in of the Visund gas pipeline to the Kvitebjørn line, which runs to the Kollsnes processing plant near Bergen.