Ormen Lange is a

natural gas field A petroleum reservoir or oil and gas reservoir is a subsurface accumulation of hydrocarbons contained in porous or fractured rock formations. Such reservoirs form when kerogen (ancient plant matter) is created in surrounding rock by the presence ...

on the

Norwegian continental shelf The Norwegian continental shelf ( no, Den norske kontinentalsokkelen) (abbreviated as NCS) is the continental shelf over which Norway exercises sovereign rights as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The area of the s ...

. It is situated northwest of

Kristiansund Kristiansund (, ; historically spelled Christianssund and earlier named Fosna) is a municipality on the western coast of Norway in the Nordmøre district of Møre og Romsdal county. The administrative center of the municipality is the town of ...

, where seabed depths vary between . The field is named after the famous

longship Longships were a type of specialised Scandinavian warships that have a long history in Scandinavia, with their existence being archaeologically proven and documented from at least the fourth century BC. Originally invented and used by the Nors ...

'' Ormen Lange'' of

Olaf Tryggvason Olaf Tryggvason (960s – 9 September 1000) was King of Norway from 995 to 1000. He was the son of Tryggvi Olafsson, king of Viken (Vingulmark, and Rånrike), and, according to later sagas, the great-grandson of Harald Fairhair, first King of N ...

, a 10th-century

Viking Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...

king of Norway.

History

Production of gas began with three wells in September 2007. The King and Queen of Norway attended the official opening of this project, delivered on time and inside budget, on 6 October 2007, at the football stadium in

Molde Molde () is a town and municipality in Møre og Romsdal county, Norway. It is located in the traditional district of Romsdal. It is located on the Romsdal Peninsula, surrounding the Fannefjord and Moldefjord. The administrative centre of the m ...

. During the opening, King Harald officially opened the terminal which would supply

Great Britain Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the largest European island and the ninth-largest island in the world. It is ...

with enough

natural gas Natural gas (also called fossil gas or simply gas) is a naturally occurring mixture of gaseous hydrocarbons consisting primarily of methane in addition to various smaller amounts of other higher alkanes. Low levels of trace gases like carbo ...

to cover 20% of its total annual needs. The proposal to build the Langeled subsea pipeline, the world’s second longest subsea export

pipeline Pipeline may refer to: Electronics, computers and computing * Pipeline (computing), a chain of data-processing stages or a CPU optimization found on ** Instruction pipelining, a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a s ...

, was approved in February 2003. The pipeline runs across the

North Sea The North Sea lies between Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. An epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the south and the Norwegian S ...

from

Nyhamna Nyhamna is a small peninsula on the northeast side of the island of Gossa in Aukra Municipality in Møre og Romsdal county, Norway. It is located along the Julsundet strait, about northeast of the village of Varhaugvika and northeast of the ...

to the

Easington Gas Terminal The Easington Gas Terminal is one of six main gas terminals in the UK, and is situated on the North Sea coast at Easington, East Riding of Yorkshire and Dimlington. The other main gas terminals are at St Fergus, Aberdeenshire; Bacton, Norfolk; ...

near the mouth of the River

Humber The Humber is a large tidal estuary on the east coast of Northern England. It is formed at Trent Falls, Faxfleet, by the confluence of the tidal rivers Ouse and Trent. From there to the North Sea, it forms part of the boundary between th ...

on the UK’s East coast.

Reserves

The reservoir is approximately long and wide, and lies about below

sea level Mean sea level (MSL, often shortened to sea level) is an average surface level of one or more among Earth's coastal bodies of water from which heights such as elevation may be measured. The global MSL is a type of vertical datuma standardised g ...

. Recoverable gas reserves are estimated to be ~300 billion cubic meters.

Technical description

The Ormen Lange field has been developed without using conventional offshore platforms. Instead, 24 subsea wellheads in four seabed templates on the ocean floor are connected directly by two pipelines to an onshore process terminal at

. After processing, the gas is exported by the world's second longest subsea gas pipeline -

Langeled pipeline The Langeled pipeline (originally known as Britpipe) is an underwater gas pipeline transporting Norwegian natural gas to the United Kingdom. Before the completion of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, it was the longest subsea pipeline in the world. ...

- approximately from Nyhamna to Easington in

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. The northern section of the export pipeline has a diameter of , and the section from Sleipner to Easington has a diameter of . The field produces 70 million cubic meters of

per day. Total cost is estimated to reach 66

billion Billion is a word for a large number, and it has two distinct definitions: *1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or (ten to the ninth power), as defined on the short scale. This is its only current meaning in English. * 1,000,000,000,000, i.e ...

Norwegian krone The krone (, abbreviation: kr (also NKr for distinction); code: NOK), plural ''kroner'', is currency of the Kingdom of Norway (including Svalbard). Traditionally known as the Norwegian crown in English. It is nominally subdivided into 100 ''� ...

r (around

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

12 billion) by the time of completion. The onshore facility at Nyhamna was designed by

Aker Solutions Aker Solutions ASA, an engineering company based in Oslo, provides the products, systems and services required to unlock energy from sources such as oil, gas, offshore wind and capture. The company, founded in 1841, was known as Aker Kværner u ...

Engineering in 2003-2007.

Natural conditions

Extreme natural conditions at the site (subzero temperatures part of the year, stormy seas, strong underwater currents, uneven seabed) put great demands on the technology used in the project. The

Storegga Slide The three Storegga Slides ( no, Storeggaraset) are amongst the largest known submarine landslides. They occurred at the edge of Norway's continental shelf in the Norwegian Sea, approximately 6225–6170 BCE. The collapse involved an estimated ...

s that occurred in the area about 8,000 years ago have been investigated, with the conclusion that the risk of recurrence is negligible.

Ownership and operators

Several companies share ownership of Ormen Lange. *

Petoro Petoro is a company that is wholly owned by the Government of Norway. Established in 2001, it manages the Government's portfolio—collectively called State's Direct Financial Interest (SDFI)—of exploration and production licenses for p ...

AS: 36.4850% *

Statoil Equinor ASA (formerly Statoil and StatoilHydro) is a Norwegian state owned enterprise, state-owned multinational energy company headquartered in Stavanger. It is primarily a petroleum company, petroleum company, operating in 36 countries with ad ...

: 25.3452% *

Norske Shell Shell plc is a British Multinational corporation, multinational petroleum, oil and natural gas, gas company headquartered in London, England. Shell is a public limited company with a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and second ...

: 17.8134% *

DONG Energy Dong or DONG may refer to: Places * Dong Lake, or East Lake, a lake in China * Dong, Arunachal Pradesh, a village in India * Dong (administrative division) (동 or 洞), a neighborhood division in Korea Persons *Queen Dong (1623–1681), princes ...

: 14.0208% *

ExxonMobil ExxonMobil Corporation (commonly shortened to Exxon) is an American multinational oil and gas corporation headquartered in Irving, Texas. It is the largest direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and was formed on November 30, ...

: 6.3356% Ormen Lange was operated by

during the development stage. On 30 November 2007,

took over as the operator.

References

External links

*
Ormen Lange in Aftenbladet Energi Interactive Energy Map

Ormen Lange (Statoil website)Geological structure of Ormen Lange gas field (in russian)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ormen Lange (Gas Field) Natural gas fields in Norway North Sea energy Equinor oil and gas fields Former Ørsted (company) oil and gas fields Shell plc oil and gas fields ExxonMobil oil and gas fields