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“Chaos at Goliat”

There are dark clouds over the Goliat project, critics say.

There are major problems with the construction of the floating production unit for the Goliat field, sources close to the project say.

Location

When in production, Goliat will be the northernmost oil field on the Norwegian shelf. The project operated by Eni (65%) together with Statoil (35%) is based on 174 million barrels of oil resources. Production is planned to start late 2014. However, people closely associated with the project now warn about the state of affairs in key parts of the project.

According to Offshore.no, the Hyundai Heavy Industries is taking a number of shortcuts which ultimately might lead to reduced technical standards at the project FPSO, the floating production storage and offloading unit.

“It is chaos”, a source says to the website. Reportedly, Hyundai is not sufficiently taking Norwegian offshore standards into account and key project personnel do not know enough about Norwegian Arctic waters.

Already in 2010, the Norwegian Petroluem Safety Authority warned about a possible lack of competence about Norwegian regulations among the contractors. As previously reported, the project is also significantly behind its original time schedules.

The Hyundai Heavy Industries in 2010 got the contract on the construction of the FPSO, a Sevan-1000. The contract originally had a price tag of 6,9 billion NOK (€830 million), but has later become far more expensive. The whole project is now estimated to cost Eni about 37 billion NOK

The Goliat field is located in the western part of the Barents Sea at a water depth of about 400 meters.