Honeywell Leverages Solutions for Statoil Offshore Oil Platform Management

Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS) will provide automation and safety solutions to enable remote onshore oil operation for an unmanned offshore platform in the North Sea, reducing overall production costs and improving safety.

When drilling operations are completed, Statoil’s Valemon platform, located on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, will become a periodically-manned installation and Statoil’s first platform that will be operated from shore.

Control operations will be located in Bergen, some 160 kilometers away from the platform itself. Moving personnel off the facility will improve the overall safety of the operations while also boosting efficiency by centralizing the controls at the company’s Bergen location.

As companies move oil platforms farther offshore and into other remote, challenging locations to find oil and gas, managing those operations efficiently while reducing risk to workers will become increasingly important.

Honeywell will serve as the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) automation contractor for the project. Honeywell will provide a range of control and safety technologies for the project including new operator stations and critical alarm panels at the onshore Bergen operations center that will communicate with the systems on Valemon. This solution will reduce the complexity of remote operations and reduce overall operating costs compared with standard solutions.

The Valemon platform sits in about 440 feet (135 meters) of water and will produce natural gas and condensate from one of the biggest undeveloped natural gas fields in the North Sea with an estimated 192 million barrels of oil equivalent. Once drilling is complete in 2017, the platform will have 10 production wells. Statoil is an oil and gas company that operates in over 30 countries including India.

Honeywell has local R&D and manufacturing setups to support local as well as global customers. "We are the number one player in India since 1988, and will continue our focus on the market here" said Vimal Kapur, President, HPS group of Honeywell. With more and more integration of emerging technologies like IoT, big data mobility, and data security, Honeywell expects to offer leading-edge solutions to its Indian customers.