After 20 years, production at offshore Yme field will start with Lotos Group’s stake

Repsol has received approval to start production from the Yme field. Norwegian authorities have given oil company Repsol permission to start production from the Yme field in the North Sea, 20 years after the last production so far from this oil field on the Norwegian shelf. Lotos Group holds a 20 per cent stake in the Yme project.

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) announced on Wednesday, 11 July that Yme will produce oil again, with a planned start-up in the second half of 2021.

Yme is one of the first oil fields on the Norwegian shelf to be redeveloped after being shut down in 2001. At that time, further production was deemed not to be viable. Between 1996 and 2001, the field was produced by Statoil – now Equinor.

The original Yme project involved the construction of a jack-up production facility and a storage ship unit (FSU).
A new plan for development and operation (PDO) was approved for Yme in 2007, but the project did not proceed due to structural integrity issues with the MOPU platform used in the field (cracks were detected in the new structure). The MOPU platform was to be set on supports on a bottom-floored caisson.

Repsol became operator of Yme through the acquisition of Talisman and its new amended PDO was for a combination of existing and new facilities and wells on the 316 and 316 B production licences.
In each of these licences, Repsol Norge AS (operator) has a 55% interest, Lotos Exploration and Production Norge AS has 20%, Okea ASA has 15% and KUFPEC Norway AS has 10%.
Lotos, through its Norwegian company, acquired an interest in the concession associated with the Yme field in 2008.

NPD added in a news release published on Wednesday that the new equipment and facilities to be commissioned are a contracted (rented) drilling and production installation in the form of a Maersk Inspirer self-lifting platform and a wellhead module placed on an existing caisson. A new permanent support structure for the caisson was also installed, as well as a new subsea template (subsea frame).

The revised PDO was approved in March 2018 without objection. The development project has been delayed by more than a year and the developers have estimated the total investment at NOK 12 billion (USD 1.35 billion).

It is worth mentioning that Maersk Drilling has sold the Maersk Inspirer platform to Havila, so now the Yme developers are leasing the platform from Havila. Later, the platform is to be sold to the concessionaires of the Yme field, which is operated by Repsol, for a price of USD 373 million.

The recoverable reserves of the Yme field are estimated at about 10 million cubic metres of oil (about 63 million barrels).
The Yme field is located in the North Sea 110 km off the Norwegian coast.

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