Statoil's first fast-track project - Visund South - is moving ahead as planned. The seabed template has commenced its journey out to the field located south of Gullfaks in the North Sea.

'We submitted the plan for development and operation of Visund South in January. Now, four months later, we've built the first seabed template for the first fast-track project. We've come a long way towards cutting the time from discovery to production in half,' says Kjetel Digre, who is responsible for project implementation in Technology, Projects & Drilling.

The Visund South seabed template was placed on a barge at Grenland Group's yard in Tønsberg last week. It will be installed on the field between the Gullfaks C and Visund platforms in June.

Visund South is expected to come on stream in 2012.

The template is the first to have been built from a standard catalogue for subsea equipment.

This will form the basis for the continuing development and use of the standard catalogue in the fast-track portfolio.

'We've been working closely with the supplier industry to develop standard equipment for this part of our field development portfolio. This means that we can start to build equipment more quickly and develop smaller finds more efficiently,' says Halfdan Knudsen, who heads up the fast-track portfolio on the NCS.

It has taken less than a year to build the Visund South structure from the signing of the contract for subsea equipment with FMC.

Subsea 7 will carry out the actual installation on the seabed.

Visund South field installation will take place at the same time as that on the Marulk development, which Statoil is carrying out on behalf of operator Eni. This will mean increased efficiency and cost savings for both projects.

Statoil's high health, safety and environment (HSE) standards are fully integrated at all fast-track project development stages.

'HSE integration at all fast-track development stages is crucial to our success. I believe that all of our efforts to standardise and industrialise field developments through the fast-track process will bring us a predictability that will impact safety in a positive way,' says Digre.

Tags: Statoil