Oil Discovery in the Snorre Area - Planning for Rapid Development

Equinor and its partners have made a commercial oil discovery in the Snorre area in the North Sea. The partnership has already planned for a rapid and cost-effective development.

The well, drilled by the Deepsea Atlantic rig, has confirmed hydrocarbons. Preliminary volume estimate is between 25 and 89 million barrels of recoverable oil equivalents (4–14.2 million standard cubic metres).

“The new discovery will be tied back quickly to existing subsea facilities and produced through the Snorre A platform. Near field exploration is important for extending the lifetime of fields already in operation. Since most of the infrastructure has already been paid off, these are competitive barrels,” says Erik Gustav Kirkemo, senior vice president for the Southern Area in Exploration & Production Norway.

Omega South is a pilot for a new, faster and more cost-efficient approach to developing subsea fields, showing the way for how the Norwegian continental shelf will evolve in the years to come.

“What is new is that we are now planning the field development prior to discovery. This makes it possible to bring new discoveries into production in just two to three years. The exploration well was drilled through a foundation. The partnership plans to reuse both this foundation and parts of the exploration well in the field development, which reduces costs and enables a faster start-up,” says Trond Bokn, senior vice president for Project Development at Equinor.

Norwegian oil and gas are crucial for European energy security. Norway supplies 20 percent of Europe’s oil demand and 30 percent of its gas demand, but production from existing fields is declining. It is therefore important to increase exploration activity and accelerate the development of new discoveries that can be tied back to existing fields.

“Equinor’s ambition is to maintain approximately the same production level in 2035 as in 2020. This corresponds to around 1.2 million barrels of oil and gas per day from the Norwegian continental shelf. About 70 percent of this will come from new wells and developments, and we plan to drill 250 exploration wells, most of them near existing fields,” says Kirkemo.

The Snorre field has been producing since 1992 and has continued to receive new volumes, most recently with the start-up of the Snorre Expansion Project in 2020. This subsea development added 200 million barrels and extended the field’s lifetime beyond 2040. The new Omega South discovery can now be tied into this infrastructure, which also helps reduce the total development cost.

“This is fully aligned with Equinor’s strategy to optimise the oil and gas portfolio, ensure high value creation, and contribute to a responsible energy transition. By using existing infrastructure, both costs and environmental footprint are reduced, while the resources on the Norwegian shelf are utilised efficiently,” Bokn says.