Ormen Lange is one of Norway’s largest industrial projects to date and at the height of construction it involved around 20,000 people from more than 50 countries.

The construction team started work in April 2004. From September the same year they spent 18 months creating underground storage areas for condensate, a light oil. In 2005, the team laid foundations for buildings and equipment, installed concrete columns and laid cable trays. In total, they used 200,000 cubic metres of concrete.

In October 2005, the drillship West Navigator started drilling the first well on the Ormen Lange field. In 2006, the team installed 30,000 tonnes of steel in pipe structures at the facility.

The facility was completed, tested and commissioned in September 2007. Shell took over operatorship of Ormen Lange on December 1, 2007. Hydro, who merged with Statoil in October 2007, was the operator in the development phase. Ormen Lange operates without a platform and includes 19 wells divided between four templates – structures containing slots for well equipment – on the sea floor. Two 30-inch pipelines transport the gas to the land facility in Nyhamna, where it is separated into natural gas and condensate for export. Produced condensate is stored in underground caverns prior to export by tanker. The Ormen Lange wellbores were the world’s largest in diameter at the time of installation.

The gas only spends about ten minutes at the processing facility before travelling 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) through the Langeled pipeline – one of the world’s longest subsea pipelines – to the UK. Ormen Lange established Norway as the third largest exporter of gas in the world, after Russia and Qatar.

Phase 3: 

Norwegian energy services company Aker Solutions has won a letter of intent with Shell in Norway for work on the Ormen Lange Phase 3 (OLP3) onshore project.

Under the scope of the letter of intent, Aker Solutions will be responsible for the integration of the wet gas subsea compression system at the field with the Nyhamna onshore gas plant in Norway.

Subsea compression will enable increased recovery from the Shell-operated Ormen Lange field. Aker Solutions’ scope includes a 500-metric-ton module which will be fabricated at the company’s yard in Egersund, Norway. The contract will have a value of approximately NOK 600 million (around $67,9 million). The delivery will include both engineering, procurement, construction, and installation (EPCI). The awarded contract is a continuation of the front-end engineering and design (FEED) delivered by Aker Solutions. The contract is called off under an established long-term frame agreement for Nyhamna brownfield modifications.

Pre-execution work will start during first half of 2021. Pending final investment decision for the OLP3 project and confirmation from Norske Shell later in 2021, the work will progress into the execution phase. The engineering, procurement and project management will mostly be executed from Aker Solutions’ offices in Stavanger and Kristiansund, Norway. The module will be delivered from the company’s Egersund yard. The contract also involves civil construction and construction of new facilities at the site, which will be managed by a dedicated site team from Aker Solutions with support from partners. The work is expected to be completed in 2024. The contract will be booked as order intake in the fourth quarter of 2020 in the Electrification, Maintenance and Modifications segment.