Gazprom has begun converting an exploratory well on Kirinskoye gas-condensate field in the Sea of Okhotsk for use in production and will drill another production well this year as part of the Sakhalin-3 project in far eastern Russia.
The company’s Polyarnaya Zvezda (Polar Star) semisubmersible rig is performing the work. The wells will be completed subsea in 90 m of water, 28 km offshore Sakhalin Island, and tied back to a processing facility under construction onshore.
Gazprom said the project will become the first on the Russian shelf to produce gas through a subsea production system.
It said a subsea manifold has been installed at Kirinskoye, along with a pipeline to carry produced fluids to the coast and a pipeline to carry monoethylene glycol to the field. Trenching is under way for gas flowlines and control cables.
Onshore, hydrostatic testing has begun in a 139-km pipeline that will carry gas from the processing facility to the Sakhalin main compressor station on the Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok transmission system.
The processing and transport system is designed to handle production from other Sakhalin-3 fields. In addition to the Kirinskoye block, the project covers the Ayashsky and Vostochno-Odoptinsky licenses, all held by Gazprom.
Gazprom estimates Kirinskoye reserves at 162.5 billion cu m of gas and 19.1 million tonnes of condensate.