Gazprom Inaugurates Rig Work for New Yamal Field

Russian state-run gas monopoly Gazprom has held the foundation-laying ceremony for its ice-resistant platform that will be used to develop the Kamennomysskoye Sea field in Russia's far north, it said June 25.

Construction work is taking place at a shipyard owned by the United Shipbuilding Corporation in the Astrakhan region on the Caspian Sea and will also take place at other Russian shipyards for final assembly on the Baltic.

The Kamennomysskoye Sea field is in the Ob Bay of the Kara Sea. Production is due to start in 2025, with a design output (for Cenomanian deposits) of 15bn m³/yr. It will become the first shelf project in the world to be implemented in such extreme ice and climate conditions, Gazprom said, explaining its decision to use a special ice-resistant platform as the key facility.

The platform will be "firmly fixed on the muddy bottom of Ob Bay with the help of a piled gravity base foundation: the platform will be placed on the seabed, the underwater part will be filled with seawater and then fixed in place with 56 piles more than 2 m in diameter, driven 47 m into the seabed," Gazprom said.

Several Russian shipbuilding and machine-building centres are contributing under the 'distributed shipyard' principle. Separate components of the platform will be simultaneously put together in Russia's Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic, in Severodvinsk, in Yekaterinburg and in Rybinsk. The platform will be finally assembled in one piece in Kaliningrad and be towed to the field in the summer of 2024. Construction operations will involve about 7,000 Russian workers and specialists.

Gazprom has set up an integrated project office bringing together representatives of the relevant units of Gazprom, Gazprom Invest, the platform designer and contractor Krasnoyarskgazprom Neftegazproject and Gazprom Dobycha Yamburg, the operator and holder of the exploration and production licence.