Shell: Nyhamna Expansion Will be Ready in 2017
A Shell-led project to expand the Nyhamna gas export terminal in mid-Norway is on schedule to be commissioned next year, senior executives told reporters there on September 27.
Shell’s vice president of conventional oil and gas projects Graham Henley hailed the "multi-billion" dollar project’s importance at a briefing attended by NGW, while Mark Wildon, general manager for Shell-operated projects in Norway, said the expansion is now “85%-complete.”
A fourth compressor, already built alongside the existing three at Nyhamna, will once commissioned boost Nyhamna’s export capacity to 84mn m³/d (30.7bn m³/yr). Existing capacity is 70mn m³/yr but actual flows are much lower.
The expansion project's last module arrived at Nyhamna in January 2016, (c) Shell
All gas processed at Nyhamna goes through the Langeled pipeline, opened in two stages in 2006-07, and has covered about 20% of UK gas supplies.
The increased export capacity will be ready in 2017, the year when first gas from the Statoil-operated Aasta Hansteen gasfield was to have started flowing through the Polarled subsea pipe to Nyhamna. But a year ago, Statoil said that first gas from Aasta Hansteen would be delayed to 2018.
Polarled has already been laid subsea and into the Nyhamna site, and Shell’s Wildon said that final work to integrate it into the Nyhamna complex is entering "a critical and demanding phase.”
Aasta Hansteen’s delay raises questions as to how much Shell may boost production from the Ormen Lange field, which it operates and which today is the only field supplying Nyhamna/Langeled.
Two new recently-installed compressors, built to suck gas out of the deepwater Ormen Lange field some 120 km offshore, also form part of the Nyhamna expansion. Since 2007 when it started up, the Ormen Lange field has produced under its own pressure, so no compression was needed at Nyhamna. But with reservoir pressure declining, the two compressors will extend field lifetime.
Shell says these two 38-MW compressors, once commissioned in 2017, will enable Ormen Lange production capacity to be maintained at 70mn m³/d for many more years. But it has declined to be drawn on whether, or by how much, it plans actually to boost the field’s production, or if the fourth export (48-MW) compressor might indeed let it exceed its new nominal 70mn m³/d capacity. “There might be a modest increment in production,” said Henley.
Ormen Lange has slowed recently to about 50mn m³/d. Indeed, at midday on September 28 it was barely 15mn m3/d – less than 8% of UK gas demand -- owing to temporary operational factors. Shell's Ormen Lange partners are Norwegian state Petoro, Denmark's Dong, and US major ExxonMobil.
Mark Smedley