Equinor Aims to Finalize Plans for Northernmost Oilfield Development

Development Plans for Wisting Oilfield

SANDEFJORD, Norway, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Norway's Equinor aims to settle the technical plans this year for developing the Wisting undersea oil discovery in the Arctic after significantly reducing its costs, a senior company executive told Reuters on Tuesday.

Equinor and its partners put development of Wisting, which is in the Barents Sea about 300 km (190 miles) off Norway's northern coast, on hold in 2022. The world's northernmost oilfield is estimated to hold 500 million barrels of crude, but costs ballooned to more than 100 billion Norwegian crowns ($10 billion).

Since then, the partnership has worked to reduce the costs and make the development profitable.

Cost Reduction Strategies

"The current plan is to have a concept selection this year and then to sanction it next year," Kjetil Hove, Equinor's head of Norwegian operations, told Reuters on a sidelines of an energy conference.

"We have improved the project significantly, but there is still work to be done," he said.

Partnership Stakeholders

Equinor was able to reduce the costs by changing the project's concept, including the floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel.

Originally, the field was to be developed with a circular shaped FPSO, similar to one used at Vaar Energi's Goliat field, but Equinor has now instead opted for a traditional ship design expected to cost less.

Equinor has also reduced the number of wells and subsea installations needed to produce the field, Hove said.

Equinor and Aker BP each have a 35% stake each in the Wisting licence, while Norway's state-owned Petoro has 20% and Japanese INPEX Idemitsu the remaining 10%.

($1 = 10.0824 Norwegian crowns)

(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; editing by Terje Solsvik and Cynthia Osterman)