WIRELINE Issue 36 - Summer 2016

ACTIVITY SURVEY 2016 ALDER PROJECT

EFFICIENCY

L-R: Ainslie Thomson, contracts advisor at Chevron; GrahamHetherington, senior executive account manager at Schlumberger; Mark Urquhart, senior completions engineer at Chevron; Marcin Kos, contracts advisor at Chevron

“ We all realised that we needed to be a single team and get away from the old-style service provider-client relationship. Chevron and Schlumberger looked to develop a fresh way of working together so that the development was executed safely while delivering real value-for-money improvements. Breaking down barriers The Alder field has a design capacity of 14,000 barrels of condensate and 110 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. It is a complex, technology- led, 28 kilometre, high-pressure high- temperature (HPHT) subsea ”

F or Chevron’s Drilling and teams, it became clear last year that improvements were needed in how the Alder project team interfaced with these teams, as well as with key service provider Schlumberger. “There’s no secret that the North Sea had become a high cost environment over the years but today’s low oil price makes this an even bigger challenge. For Chevron to maintain a sustainable business we have to look at our total cost of ownership – looking beyond simple rate reductions and driving efficient partnerships with our suppliers,” says Marcin Kos, contracts advisor at Chevron. “On the Alder project – a key capital development for Chevron in the UK – we found we had too many teams working in silos focused only on their specific roles and this posed the risk of missed delivery deadlines and increased costs. We needed to drive change.” Completions (D&C) and Supply Chain Management (SCM)

tie-back to the Britannia platform in the central North Sea. Some 75 per cent of the development work has been executed in the UK, including Aberdeen, Invergordon, Leeds and Newcastle. When it comes on-stream later this year, Alder will introduce new natural gas production to Chevron’s North Sea portfolio and help extend Britannia’s operational life, which has been producing since 1998. One of the challenges has been delivering critical products and services that were not off-the- shelf but highly specialised and customised, often requiring additional engineering. The five product service lines concerned were the subsea test tree, the downhole safety valve, wireline logging, the perforating system and the surface well test. Mark Urquhart, senior completions engineer at Chevron, explains: “There were technical and commercial

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