Portal partners
PGNiG will begin mining from a well on the Ærfugl deposit in mid 2020.
Author:Mariusz Dasiewicz
The extraction from the first well on the Ærfugl deposit will be launched in mid 2020. By the end of next year, three more holes will be included in production. From the northern Norwegian Sea, the company wants to mine half a billion cubic meters of gas a year.
"The deposit management plan is intensive and implemented according to the timetable. This is important, because the launch of production with Ærfugl will mean for PGNiG in Norway a significant increase in its own gas extraction, which we want to send to the country from the fourth quarter of 2022 by the Baltic Pipe pipeline," said the president of Polish Petroleum and Gas Mining Piotr Wozniak, quoted in the company's press release.
The deposit will be operated with seven wells – six drilled as part of a development plan and a exploratory well, implemented in 2013. Drilled holes under phase one will be included in production in November 2020.
Earlier, because in June 2020, the extraction from one of the wells planned in phase two will begin. This will be possible through the use of existing transmission infrastructure. The other two wells, which will be completed in phase two, will begin mining in the second half of 2021.
Ærfugl (formerly Snadd) is a gas-condensate deposit whose reserves are estimated at 274.7 million barrels of oil equivalent. According to the assumptions, in the peak year of production, the PGNiG’s production of this deposit will amount to approximately 0.5 billion cubic metres of natural gas.
In the development of Ærfugl Erfugl PGNiG Upstream Norway intends to use new technical solutions. The first is ETH-PiP (electrically trace-heated pipe in pipe) technology for transportation extracted from a hydrocarbon deposit. This solution consists in electric heating of individual sections of the offshore transmission pipeline, which is designed to prevent the precipitation of gas hydrates during the transport of fuel to the floating FPSO platform, a 21 km long well.
The second novelty will be the first time in the world to use operating heads with travel diameters increased to 7 inches. The concession partners decided to use them due to the projected high inflows of gas from wells.
PGNiG Upstream Norway holds 11.92 percent of the shares in the concession which it acquired in 2007. The operator is Aker BP and the other partners are Equinor Energy and Wintershall DEA.
PGNiG Upstream International AS was established in 2007 to implement on the Norwegian Continental Shelf a project aimed at increasing the mining resources of oil and natural gas outside Poland. The primary task of PGNiG Upstream International AS is to search for and exploit oil and natural gas deposits on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. The company has the pre-qualification of the Norwegian authorities to act as an operator.
PGNiG Upstream International AS holds shares in exploration and production concessions on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, located in the North Seas, Norway and Barents. The company together with partners is engaged in the extraction of hydrocarbons from the deposits of Skarv, Morvin, Vilje and Vale and participates in the development project of the deposits of Snadd in the Norwegian Sea and Gina Krog in the North Sea. On the other concessions, the company carries out search projects.
The main asset of the company is the Skarv deposit, managed by the floating production unit FPSO. This entity is owned by concession shareholders, including PGNiG Upstream International AS and is expected to continue to work for the next 20 years. Other production deposits (Morvin, Vilje and Vale) include a well assembly that has been connected to the existing mining infrastructure.
According to the strategy of the PGNiG capital group by 2022, gas extraction from deposits in Norway will increase to approximately 2.5 billion cubic metres per year.
Ultimately, the raw material from PGNiG deposits on the Norwegian Continental Shelf is to be sent to Poland via the Baltic Pipe pipeline with a capacity of 10 billion cubic meters. This is a strategic infrastructure project aimed at creating a new gas supply corridor on the European market.
The investment will enable transport of gas from Norway to Danish and Polish markets, as well as to end users in neighbouring countries. At the same time, Baltic Pipe will allow gas to be transported from Poland to Denmark.
The project is implemented by the Polish transmission pipeline operator GAZ-SYSTEM and the Danish transmission system operator Energinet.
Signature: ER
