The work should increase recovery from the field by almost 200 million barrels and oil rig flanges gulf coast production will start in 2021, Statoil said in a statement.

Statoil also awarded contracts worth some 9 billion crowns to subcontractors, including TechnipFMC, Subsea 7, Aibel and Transocean.

The plan includes drilling 24 wells, 12 for oil rig flanges gulf coast production and 12 for injection, and building six subsea templates tied to the Snorre A platform.

The field produced 80,000 barrels of oil per day during the first 10 months of 2017, data from the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate shows.

Statoil's partners in the licence are Petoro, Exxon Mobil , Idemitsu, DEA and Point Resources.

The project had been postponed so that Statoil could cut costs and improve profitability. It is still subject to formal approval by Norwegian authorities.

($1 = 8.4111 Norwegian crowns) (Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; editing by Terje Solsvik and Jason Neely)