Offshore staff
HOUSTON– A multi-disciplinary panel discussed challenges, opportunities, and technological breakthroughs of the Mad Dog field development in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico on Monday morning at the Offshore Technology Conference.
Discovered in 1998, field production began in 2005 from a floating truss spar facility that is designed to process up to 80,000 boe/d and 60 MMcf/d of natural gas. BP operates the Mad Dog facility (60.5%) with co-owners BHP Billiton (23.9%) and Chevron (15.6%).
Doris Reiter, vice president, Performance Management, BP, said technology advances in seismic data acquisition and processing have increased the estimates of oil in place at the Mad Dog field to 5 Bbbl.
Aleida Rios, vice president, Gulf of Mexico Production Operations, BP, pointed out that in September 2008 Hurricane Ike interrupted drilling by toppling the derrick with heavy winds.
“This was a moment,” Rios said, “the Gulf of Mexico will never forget.”
She added that the rig replacement program in 2012 resulted in the heaviest lift ever in the Gulf of Mexico at 86,000 tons.
Rios said that one of the breakthroughs in the project is the strategy of competitive performance. She said that following the rig replacement the focus shifted to process safety and surveillance and plant reliability. She added that the spar is running at more than 98% reliability.
In 2013, BP and its co-owners embarked on a recycle of the Phase 2 development after the initial cost estimate reached $20 billion.
Bill Steel, project general manager, Mad Dog Phase 2, BP, said that the initial second phase called “Big Dog” was an all in strategy that aimed to develop all the resources. He said the reevaluation delivered a competitive solution by incorporating value over volume, industry learned solutions, and collaboration.
Steel said the new strategy called “transformer” aims to develop key resources not all.
In December 2016, BP sanctioned Mad Dog Phase 2 at an estimated cost of less than $10 billion.
Steel said that two-thirds of the cost savings came from re-engineering the floating production system to a simplified and optimized semisubmersible production platform and using all subsea wells. One-third of the savings came from industry collaboration and standardization, he added. He said that Phase 2 is based on the Atlantis concept.
Bob Squires, NOJV project manager, Chevron, pointed out that collaboration requires willingness, objective alignment, and transparency. He also said that successful recycles reduce both costs and risk.
Stephan Drouaud, senior project manager,BHP Billiton, added that collaboration also requires trust.
05/01/2017
