The Rogaland county public prosecutor notified Statoil on 18 December that it has been fined $4.26m following the oil leak from the Statfjord A loading buoy on 12 December 2007.
“We have noted the public prosecutor’s decision,” said Thorstein Hole, vice president for the operations west cluster in Statoil. “We’ll be taking time to study the grounds for the fine.”
“We’ve made changes to the way we plan and implement modifications, strengthened the maintenance programme and adopted more secure routines for offshore loading,” Hole said.
“Together with the shipping companies, we’ve also implemented extensive upgrading work on 20 shuttle tankers we utilise on the Norwegian continental shelf.”
He notes that more than 20,000 offshore loading operations have been conducted on the NCS over the past 30 years, including 7,000 on Statfjord.
“The measures we’ve adopted have enhanced loading robustness and security even further. Monitoring of these operations has also been improved, so that such incidents can be spotted early.”
No identifiable harm was caused to the environment by the oil spill on Statfjord, according to a report from the Sintef research foundation, the Norwegian Institute for Marine Research and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.