The field is located in the northern part of the
Viking Graben, north of the
Viking Trough and east of the
East Shetland Platform, in the same general area as the
Brent oilfield discovered in 1971, and the
Cormorant oilfield,
Thistle oil field,
Dunlin oilfield,
Heather oil field and the
Hutton oilfield, all discovered by 1973. A regional grid of
reflection seismology lines showed the Brent structural trend extended into the area, forming a "large northeast-trending and northwesterly tilted" (at 6-8 degrees)
Fault block, partly
eroded on the east flank, with
Jurassic and
Cretaceous shales trapping any oil in the Middle Jurassic Brent
deltaic and
Late Triassic-
Early Jurassic Statfjord fluvial sandstones originating from the
Kimmeridge Clay Formation. The field is on the same structural trend but separated from the Brent field, 20 km to the southwest, by
normal faulting and a structural saddle. A Conoco 211/24-1 well drilled in 1972-1973 on the U.K. side of the structure turned out to be downdip to the
Oil-water contact and it was not until the April 1974
Mobil well 33/12-1, on the Norwegian side, that oil was discovered in 160 m of Brent Formation. A second well "established an oil-water contact at 2584 m subsea" and a third well discovered a 127 m oil column in the Statfjord Formation with an oil-water contact 2806 m subsea. ==Production==