Norway's biggest oil company Equinor and its partners have dropped plans to electrify the Wisting oilfield from shore due to high costs and technical complexity, it said on Thursday.
Wisting is the largest undeveloped discovery on the Norwegian continental shelf, with estimated resources of nearly 500 million barrels of oil equivalent.
"Power from shore has been thoroughly assessed but was ruled out due to technical complexity and high costs," Trond Bokn, Equinor's senior vice president for project development, said. "We are now continuing our work on power generation based on an energy-efficient gas turbine solution," he said in a statement.
A final investment decision is planned for the end of 2027. If sanctioned, Wisting could produce for around 30 years.
Equinor (42.5 per cent) operates the licence alongside Aker BP (27.5 per cent), state-owned Petoro (20 per cent) and INPEX Idemitsu (10 per cent).
Equinor and its partners on Thursday submitted for public consultation a proposed programme for the environmental impact assessment of a development of the field.
Partners have selected a floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel as the development concept. They will assess the potential for carbon capture and storage (CCS) to reduce local emissions from production, Equinor said.
(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis, editing by Anna Ringstrom)