Operations - Making it Work

This is the life for which the field must really be designed. Development planning and construction may occupy five or six years, but the facilities can operate for twenty-five years or more. Over that period, the undiscounted cost of operating and maintaining them may exceed the original capital investment. A design that looks efficient on the project schedule can therefore become an expensive burden if it is difficult to operate, hard to inspect or dependent on equipment that cannot be maintained without shutting down production.

This isn’t about facility start-up and operations on day one of commissioning. It is about the how frontline staff operate the asset safely, reliably and economically as the reservoir declines, the fluid mix changes and the equipment grows older.

I’m Jeff Parke, and this is From Basin to Balance Sheet — the integrated story of how a geological possibility becomes an investment, a producing asset and, eventually, a retirement obligation.