Ithaca Energy's Executive Chair Gilad Myerson said on Wednesday that there was a "very high likelihood" that Britain's Rosebank oil field development would be approved by authorities, Reuters has reported.
A formal sanctioning of the project could take place by the end of the year, or even sooner, he told Reuters on the sidelines of an energy conference in Norway.
Rosebank is a UK oil and gas field about 130 kilometers off the coast of the Shetland Islands with an estimated 300 million barrels of potentially recoverable reserves.
Equinor acquired operatorship of Rosebank with the acquisition of Chevron's 40% stake in 2019 and has since been working to optimize and mature a development solution for the field, originally discovered in 2004, together with partners Suncor and Ithaca Energy.
Chevron's sale to Equinor marked its full exit from the project, for which it had planned to deploy a newbuild FPSO with a 100,000 b/d oil, 80 mmcf/d gas production capacity, with storage for about 1 million barrels. This was to be the deepest-moored facility on the UK Continental Shelf. Before the sale to Equinor, Chevron had planned to have the field online in 2024.
The development concept for the Rosebank field now includes the redeployment and reuse of the existing Petrojarl Knarr FPSO owned by Altera.
