New drilling campaign started at the Jotun field

ExxonMobil has commenced drilling operations on the first production well in a new drilling campaign at its Jotun field located in the North Sea, 200 km west of Stavanger. Three production wells are planned to be drilled from the Jotun B platform in this program.

Campaign estimated to cost 90 million dollar

In the time that has passed since production startup at Jotun in 1999, around 75 percent of the field’s reserves have been produced. The daily average production at Jotun was 13,000 barrels of oil in 2005. Two drilling campaigns have been conducted at Jotun, the last one being completed in 2003. The current drilling campaign, which is planned to be completed early 2007, is estimated to cost around 90 million dollar.

All new wells to be drilled in the Tau structure

The Jotun field is made up of three structures – Elli, Elli South, and Tau. Available information from existing wells, and new seismic data, including 4-D surveys, have been integrated into a geo-model which has been scaled up to a new reservoir simulation model. The new well will target the area where this model showed that there is a potential to recover oil from the reservoir sands overlaying and to the east of the four existing oil production wells in the Tau structure.

Jotun spare production capacity utilized for processing oil/gas from Balder and Ringhorne

Decline in Jotun production over the last years has resulted in spare production capacity. In order to utilize this capacity, the nearby Balder field was linked to Jotun via a gas pipeline in 2003. Furthermore, pipelines where installed between Ringhorne and Jotun in 2004, allowing parts of the Ringhorne field to produce to the Jotun FPSO in addition to Balder. In 2005, Ringhorne sent an average of 39,000 barrels of oil per day to Jotun for final processing and storage prior to export. In addition, 25 million standard cubic feet per day of gas was exported to Jotun from Balder and Ringhorne for gas sale.

ExxonMobil is the operator of Jotun and has 45% equity in the field. Other participants are Shell (45%), Petoro (3%), and Lundin (7%).