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New technology that employs drilling of sidetracks in subsea fields tested successfully in the Norwegian Sea improves oil recovery, StatoilHydro announced.
StatoilHydro developed along with FMC Technologies a new technology called "through tubing rotary drilling" that enables developers to reuse old wells in a less expensive way.
The Norwegian oil company said it tested the TTRD at its Asgard field in the Norwegian Sea with promising results.
Oystein Arvid Haland, head of subsurface technology in StatoilHydro, said TTRD technology would produce an extra $240 million worth of oil from the Asgard field alone.
"The new concept will highly improve the efficiency of this type of operations in connection with subsea well operations, and enables us to produce oil that we would normally not have recovered," he said.
StatoilHydro relies on subsea fields for 40 percent of its oil production. TTRD production is useful in water depths of 1,640 feet, with a goal of reaching even deeper, the company noted.
"In the future we wish to utilize this technology in deep waters, for example in the Gulf of Mexico," said Haland.
British supermajor BP last week announced a giant oil discovery at its Tiber deepwater well in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the deepest in the industry.
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