ConocoPhillips has made significant savings on a complex and challenging well plugging and abandonment campaign in the UK southern North Sea by taking a ‘campaign’ approach and working collaboratively with vendors.
The company’s plugging and abandonment campaign in the southern North Sea focused on 15 offshore wells across a 541 day work programme in 2014. The teams adopted a ‘campaign’ approach to the tasks in hand, proactively engaging with personnel, working collaboratively with vendors and continually challenging assumptions. As a result, it only took 435 days which reduced costs by 35 per cent, saving over £50 million.
The wells were originally developed in the 1970s so there were a number of challenges to overcome. The team incorporated a wide variety of skill sets including, drilling, completion, intervention, fluids and wellhead specialists to ensure the safest and most cost effective solutions and tools were used in all cases.
Due to the unknowns of 30-40 year old wells, the team had to continually learn, formulate, apply and reassess mitigation strategies making constant suggestions for improvement throughout. By remaining as flexible as possible and applying a rigorous approach to ensuring that risks were controlled as changes were made, every scenario had back-up plans identified up-front which was pivotal to delivering the performance improvements.
Gerry Cooper, UK well operations manager, commented: “Our objective was to safely simplify our infrastructure in the area to reduce the cost impact of assets that were no longer producing. We also wanted to enhance the focus of our integrated operations team and demonstrate the value of collaboration.
“The success of the project really hinged on close collaboration between onshore and offshore, functional groups within ConocoPhillips and our suppliers. Thanks to this teamwork, we jointly delivered an outstanding business result – re-focusing the right people on efficient implementation, reducing operating costs, and safely achieving our goal at a much lower decommissioning cost than originally estimated.”
The learnings from this campaign are now being shared widely across the industry and the approach continues throughout ConocoPhillips’ ongoing southern North Sea plugging and abandonment and decommissioning campaign.
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