Equinor drops power-from-shore plan for Wisting oilfield project

OSLO, June 25 (Reuters) - 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%) operates the licence alongside Aker BP (27.5%), state-owned Petoro (20%) and INPEX Idemitsu (10%).

• 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 CO2 emissions from production, Equinor said.

(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis, editing by Anna Ringstrom)