Euroil: Martin Linge finally online

Norway’s Equinor has at long last commissioned the Martin Linge gas field, a troubled project that is arriving five years behind schedule and at double its original cost.

Equinor announced the launch on June 30, estimating that the North Sea field would flow 115,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd). Some 260mn boe will be recovered in total during its lifetime.

Linge was originally led by Total, now known as TotalEnergies. The French major had sought to bring it into production in 2016, and there were a number of reasons for the subsequent delays. First there was the geological complexity of the high-pressure, high-temperature field, which led to TotalEnergies encountering unexpected difficulties.

Then in May 2017, there was a fatal crane crash at the Samsung Heavy Industries shipyard in South Korea tasked with constructing its platform, resulting in another one-year delay.

Equinor took over as operator the following the year. More delays ensued, most significantly as a result of the pandemic, which brought project work to a halt. It also found problems with the wells that had previously been drilled by TotalEnergies and they had to be replaced. Overall costs are now assessed at nearly NOK63bn ($7.3bn), Equinor said on June 30, or around double what was stated in the original budget in 2012.

Meanwhile in Germany, Royal Dutch Shell has commissioned Europe’s biggest polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolyser for developing green hydrogen, the company announced on July 2.

The Refhyne electrolyser at Shell’s energy and chemicals park in Germany’s Rheinland region has a 10-MW capacity but this is set to be expanded to 100 MW at a later stage. It will use renewable energy to produce up to 1,300 tonnes per year (tpy) of green hydrogen that can be used to produce fuels with a lower carbon intensity, and later help decarbonise other industries, Shell said.