Tuesday, December 9, 2014

STATOIL’S LNG PLANT AT THE SNØHVIT GAS FIELD STOPS AFTER A SECOND GAS LEAK THIS YEAR



Statoil’s LNG Plant at the Snøhvit gas field stops after a second gas leak this year




Statoil's LNG plant on Melkøya had to shut down production due to a second gas leak.  No other information is available at this time.   Statoil had been forced to shut down production from its Melkøya LNG plant in northern Norway after a gas leak in January of this year.

Statoil's LNG plant on Melkøya had been working uninterruptedly for 185 days before it had to shut down production due to the January 2014 gas leak.

Location
The January 2014 leak occurred on Sunday evening due to a pump failure at the processing facility that produces LNG of the natural gas from the Snøhvit gas field in the Barents Sea in Hammerfest, Norway.  The plant was shut down and the system was depressurized, Finnmarken writes.

Production had not started up again on Tuesday morning and the company is still working to solve the technical problems.

Before the stop on Sunday, Statoil had 185 days of uninterrupted production at the plant.  That was the best six months at the plant since it opened in 2007.  Statoil’s LNG plant on Melkøya was closed in the month of May 2014 for turnaround.

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January 13, 2012: Norway: Statoil Halts Production from Snohvit Offshore Field Due to LNG Plant Problems



On Wednesday afternoon, Statoil temporarily shut down production at its LNG plant at Melkøya outside Hammerfest following rupture of a fire water line.

The fire water unit is part of the plant’s safety system, and Statoil implemented a controlled production shut down.  A water leakage at the rupture site has excavated some of the soil at the site of the leak.

“We are working to clarify the cause of the water leakage and preparing the repair work, so that we can resume production quickly,” says Øivind Nilsen, production director for Hammerfest LNG.

Hammerfest LNG receives gas from the Snøhvit field and production from the field will be halted until the safety systems are back in operation. Statoil said it was too early to say anything about the duration of the production halt. Statoil’s share of production from Snøhvit is 48,000 barrels of oil equivalents per day.

The fire water unit is regularly tested and inspected, most recently in the early hours of Wednesday morning this week.

Snøhvit is the first offshore development in the Barents Sea. Without surface installations, this project involves bringing natural gas to land for liquefaction and export from the first plant of its kind in Europe and the world’s northernmost liquefied natural gas facility.


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Statoil Shuts Down LNG Plant after Gas Leak
Posted on January 9, 2014



Statoil has shut down its Snøhvit LNG plant on the island of Melkøya, Norway, due to a gas leak, according to reports.
News agency Reuters quoted a spokesman saying that LNG plant was shut down Sunday but that a resumption of production was expected “fairly soon”.
The Snøhvit LNG plant has been shut down several times since it came onstream in September 2007.

In May 2013, it was shut down, with personnel being removed to a safe area, following a smoke alert. In June 2012 it was shut down for a week following a rupture to a firewater line at the plant.

The Melkøya plant receives gas from the Snøhvit field in the Barents Sea, with Statoil’s share of production amounting to approximately 48,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.

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'Fatality risk' in Snohvit leak



Sounding alarm: PSA over leak at Snohvit plant

 15 May 2014 12:02 GMT 

A gas leak at the Statoil-operated Snohvit LNG plant in northern Norway earlier this year posed an  explosion risk and could have resulted in loss of life, according to the country’s safety agency PSA to probe Snohvit leaks.

A gas leak that resulted in a three-day shutdown at Statoil’s Snohvit LNG plant in northern Norway earlier this week is to be investigated by the country’s Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA).

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Snoehvit LNG ready to banish shutdowns this year-Statoil


                       Plant beset by unexpected shutdowns since start in 2007

Thu Apr 25, 2013 8:00am EDT

Snoehvit expected to be more reliable after latest repairs


HAMMERFEST, Norway, April 25 (Reuters) - Major work at Norway's Snoehvit liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant will mean a stoppage-free year when it reopens this month, ending a reputation for unreliability, a Statoil senior executive said.

The plant has been beset by technical faults that led to several production stoppages in 2012, the most recent of which was a gas leak in February that caused an evacuation.
Europe's only LNG-producing plant, on Melkoeya island at Europe's northernmost tip, will restart production within a week, a maintenance officer at the plant told Reuters on Monday, after being shut since February.

"We plan no new turnaround shutdowns for this year," Oeivind Nilsen, production vice-president for Hammerfest LNG said in an interview.

The plant, which can produce 4.3 million tonnes per year (mtpa) of super-cooled gas per year for transport by ship to markets in Europe, the United States and Asia, has suffered from long outages in the past.

"The regularity of the Snoehvit plant for the last three years has been in the order of 73 percent, and that, of course, is not acceptable," Nilsen said.

"Compared to other LNG plants in the world we need to make a significant step-up in regularity."

Nilsen said Statoil had made the plant more robust, and the latest modifications were expected to increase the number of days per year it operates.

"I think, it will lift regularity by 10 percent if we only solve the problem with the pre-treatment facility," Nilsen said.

The February gas leak was detected inside the "cold box", where cryogenic heat-exchangers are arranged together with the piping, with empty spaces filled with insulation material.

"When we experienced the gas leakage in the "cold box" we knew that it would result in a long shutdown due to difficult access and extensive pre-work," said Nilsen.
"But this also gave us a golden opportunity to move forward remedies we actually planned for the next year."

READY MADE DELIVERY
Several critics blame Snoehvit's design for its long shutdowns as the plant was delivered on a barge as a finished product, instead of having been built on-site.

In order to transport it on the ship, the size was reduced, leaving not much space between the components, and making fixing faults more difficult than at the other plants.
"When Snoehvit was developed we were crossing frontiers, both geographically, being the first in the Barents Sea, and also technology-wise," Nilsen said.

The plant also uses an unique gas liquefaction technology, the Mixed Fluid Cascade (MFC), developed together by Statoil and Germany-based engineering company Linde AG. Most LNG plants use liquefaction technology developed by Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.
New elements included gas production with subsea templates controlled from onshore some 150 km away, sea water cooling, and re-injecting carbon dioxide stripped from the feed gas back to a subsea reservoir.

Statoil has a 36.79 percent stake in the Snohevit licence, with state-owned Petoro 30 percent, Total 18.4 percent, GDF Suez 12 percent and RWE Dea 2.81 percent.
Last year Statoil and partners decided against a second processing unit, or train, at Snoehvit, partly because there was not enough gas reserves to justify it.
"I think that new gas discoveries in the Barents Sea will trigger coming back to discussions about the second train," Nilsen said, adding that it was unlikely to happen this year as the focus of exploration in the Barents Sea was oil.

Gas production from the field, which started in 2007, totalled 4.7 bcm in 2012, up from 4.3 bcm in 2011, but lower than the peak of 4.9 bcm in 2010.