The Intervention Opportunity: Why the Industry Does Not Do More and How New Collaborative Workflows with Aligned Outcomes Can Change This

Abstract

Summary This analysis challenges the typical way interventions have been planned and executed, both on an operational and a commercial basis, and examines where there is room for significant improvement in the industry. Perhaps more importantly, it examines the case for performing interventions and tries to explain the challenges (“headwinds”) in what is an opportunity to achieve both financial and net-zero emissions goals. Benchmarked data have already shown that opportunity absolutely exists to do more, and we investigate why the intervention opportunity is underserved. By appreciating the issues operators face when justifying and designing intervention activities, the challenges can thus be addressed by proper alignment to the best outcome. Intervention global expenditure is a small percentage of the total cost of exploration and production, and yet there is a strong value case for such operations. This study examines why this is so and then looks at how to address those issues. There is a huge array of well integrity and reservoir performance challenges that can bottleneck production, and the industry has delivered many innovative solutions to address these issues. Reduced capital expenditure over the past years and the pressure to maintain production sustainably should create a perfect climate for intervention. However, an asset mindset that is often risk averse to entering a producing well, as well as complex workflows, will too often detract from the opportunity to intervene. New workflows—including digital—can simplify the identification of candidate wells, and intervention techniques can help determine the success rate of the operations, as well as incremental production gains, more reliably to enable more robust outcomes. However, current contracting techniques and conventional key performance indicators can also cause further misalignment as to the true goal of interventions being to increase production sustainably. Those issues and how they have been resolved are addressed in this study. New workflows and commercial models have been used to facilitate the quicker identification of intervention opportunities, enabling collaborative planning and optimal solution identification, combined with feedback mechanisms to ensure continuous close collaboration between technical experts enabled by digital tools, which can disrupt the conventional intervention model. Case examples support the arguments made and demonstrate a new way of performing interventions. New digital workflows combined with strong collaborative, technical domain knowledge and a wide array of possible intervention solutions can change current typical intervention models. With these changes, further improvements can then be made to the conventional business models used to maximize the intervention opportunity and the sustainability opportunities it brings with regard to getting the most out of existing infrastructure.