Eni Eyes Goliat Restart 'Within Days'
Friday 23 September 2016
Eni is gearing up for an imminent resumption at its problematic Goliat oilfield in the Barents Sea off Norway.
The Italian major will initially start output from the cylindrical floating production platform at a reduced rate before soon pushing for a resumption of full production.
"Eni Norge is preparing to resume production on the Goliat field in the next few days," a spokesman for the operator stated.
"Maximum production capacity is expected to be reached soon after, with full re-injection of gas and produced water."
Goliat has been offline since last month after a power failure led to an evacuation. Eni has since been working on a plan to ensure safe operation of the floater, with Norway's Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) insisting the field remains shut in the interim.
Notice of its intention to resume production indicates that the PSA will not stand in Eni's way,
A spokesman at the PSA told that the authority met with the oil company earlier this week, where Eni presented it with information relating to the planned safe start-up of Goliat. The spokesman would not reveal specific details of the plan.
In an exclusive interview that appeared in Friday's weekly issue of Upstream, Eni Norge managing director Philip Hemmens said the company was confident that it could overcome the problems at Goliat.
“During the last weeks we have retrained staff in safe job analysis, put in extra safety coaches, discipline co-ordinators and an operations and maintenance advisor in an effort to boost the organisation, and we have made efforts to improve both the formal and informal dialogue with the unions and authorities," Hemmens said.
"There was a need for a timeout organisationally. Now I am hearing from the platform that everyone is comfortable to restart production."
The power outage in August was the second such incident since the field was brought on stream in May after a delay of more than two years due to fabrication and commissioning issues.
It followed a series of safety incidents at the troubled field amid concerns expressed by unions over the Italian operator’s management of operations on the cylindrical floating production, storage and offloading vessel.
“The latest incident was caused by the automatic shutdown of power generation on the platform to eliminate ignition sources after gas was detected in an unwanted area during a controlled process to vent gas," Hemmens stated this week.
According to Hemmens, this happened because gas went in the opposite direction to the wind and triggered an alarm in an area where a detector was not shut off.
The incident was complicated by the fact that the emergency diesel generator overheated.
“This also happened during an emergency shutdown in May, and we thought we had fixed it, but there were still some problems with one cooling valve,” Hemmens said.
“When the platform went over to battery power we decided to evacuate a part of the crew since logistics like toilets were not going to work,” he added.