Oil and gas project development in the North Sea is known for large discoveries, requiring the need for highly complex, capital intensive infrastructure, which can take decades to complete. Recognizing that such discoveries were becoming less common, a faster and less capital intensive approach was needed to develop smaller fields. The idea was to target fields close to existing infrastructure that could tie back to current installations and only require a seabed template. Historically, these types of projects would take the company over five years to complete. A dedicated team was established to plan these smaller projects, appropriately called “Fast Track” projects, and was challenged with cutting development time in half. The Fast Track team used lean principles to analyze project lead times and target improvement opportunities. Lean is a methodology made famous in automotive manufacturing, which seeks to eliminate time wasting activities and reduce overall lead time (De Wardt 1994). The primary lean technique employed by the team was value stream mapping. First, the team mapped out the entire project development process, from discovery to production, and identified all the key steps in the process. Second, the team estimated the time it takes to perform each major step in the process and calculated the total lead time for project development. Finally, the team quantified all the sources of delays and developed opportunities for improvement. These opportunities were then ranked based on the potential time and cost savings. With the prioritized opportunities, an improvement road map was developed to steer the team in the right direction. The improvement road map contained a four-pronged approach to cut project development times in half: StandardizationCollaborationStreamlined processesChange management Standardization involved developing standard subsea templates, well designs, and completions equipment to cut the time to develop solutions. Collaboration involved integrating the operator and the service company and making use of teams in different time zones to accelerate well design and planning. Streamlined processes focused on combining decision gates in capital projects and working the well construction process in parallel to the project development process to reduce planning time. Finally, change management involved establishing a continuous improvement process, a system to implement ideas and engrain them into the organization, and a common set of key performance indicators to align different stakeholders and drive execution results. Implementation of these improvement opportunities led to a reduction of over two years in the time needed to complete the development projects: from 5.3 years to an average of three years.

This study objective was to design a functionally integrated digital enhanced oil recovery (ID-EOR) solution enabling pseudo-real-time optimization of injection and production networks to help improve asset performance and maximize net present value. ID-EOR indicators for each business process (e.g., injected fluid-to-oil ratio, productivity index, and recovery factor), automation opportunities, workflow logic and characteristics, flow diagrams, and mathematical models were identified and mapped for injection and production processes. A swim lane- based approach was selected to structure the various automated workflows. The swim lanes are (i) injector well short-term diagnoses and network regular update, (ii) reservoir model, (iii) production network regular update, and production well short-term diagnoses. A set of engineered workflows would perform a series of tasks delivering outputs that ultimately provide the users with diagnosis and/or recommendations. Workflows can be run individually or in tandem, and goals can be met by making decisions at the well, network, and reservoir levels, or with all the levels integrated. One of the challenges to further advance ID-EOR solutions is the lack of quantitative data. Based on proprietary information, literature research, and stochastic analysis, 20 to 60% cost or resource reduction in fuel, power, maintenance and operations can be realized using digital workflows and automation. Stochastic analysis pointed to positive P50 present value of hundreds of millions of dollars, and negligible risk of unprofitability. In other words, the results obtained provided realistic expectations of benefits from digitalization and automation in the short, medium, and long terms. ID-EOR solutions offer a path to increased profitability while reducing economic and operational project risks. The sensors, data transmission, processing, and storage technologies necessary are available, and most methods have been tested individually and/or partially integrated. The next step is a full integration trial in the field. While almost fully integrated digital solutions have been previously implemented for waterflooding, this new concept design introduces a novel integrated digital solution to gather and diagnose data and make timely operational and engineering decisions to meet planned injection and production targets in EOR projects, and maximize the economic benefits.

This paper describes how a multidiscipline project team incorporated artificial islands with wellhead towers (WHTs) to develop an optimized drilling scenario reaching several hundred proposed drilling targets. As part of an economic optimization plan for a field in shallow waters, a project was undertaken to explore a means of taking advantage of artificial islands to reduce field development time, costs, and potential risks. The team collaborated with multiple stakeholders to identify the fundamental objectives of the field development project. Advanced planning and visualization software made it possible to analyze various combinations of wellhead towers and artificial islands and their surface locations, with each combination representing a different drilling scenario. Each scenario was then evaluated based on four criteria: technical feasibility of well construction, total development cost, total time for development, and degree of potential risk. This paper focuses on the methodology applied for this project, and results discussed are limited to two randomly selected scenarios and do not reflect the complete results of the numerous scenarios evaluated in this study, nor do they reflect any decisions made as a result of this study. The results of the analysis demonstrated that the level of feasibility and potential risk varied greatly depending on the scenario chosen, which led to a potential project cost difference of more than several hundred million USD. Collaborative planning among all stakeholders allowed the analysis of the various development scenarios to be completed on time and on budget with fundamental objectives met.

In 2009, the Kuwait Integrated Digital Field (KwIDF) project was established in the Sabriyah field in north Kuwait to boost production and reserves (Al-Jasmi et al. 2014). The goal was to help realize the vision of sustained oil production in Kuwait of four million barrels of oil equivalent per day (BOE/D) by 2030 . The project involved the creation of 11 integrated, automated workflows, and a real-time collaborative environment to help optimize production, reduce downtime, and improve reservoir management:• Reservoir visualization and analysis, and subsurface waterflood optimizer-helps enable the monitoring of subsurface health during the waterflooding process, and provides predictive reservoir optimization analysis and actions (Ranjan et al. 2013).By 2012, KwIDF had been deployed on 49 wells, representing a pilot that served as a proof of concept. By 2013, cumulative production gains of 756,000 barrels of oil were reported (Singh et al. 2013). While the gains were impressive, and management wanted to expand KwIDF, it was recognized that full deployment would pose significant challenges and, without a set of necessary changes, the value of KwIDF would not be realized.The key challenge facing management was to identify the appropriate operating model to deliver on the KwIDF vision and scale the program to accommodate future expansion across the rest of the organization. A transition and deployment assessment team was established by management to address this challenge.The transition and deployment assessment project produced a recommended operating model, a transition road map, change management strategy, risk and mitigation plan, and project charters to assist the program team and steering group in the deployment of KwIDF across the rest of North Kuwait.