Experiences With Respect To Cost-Effective Marginal Field Developments
Authors: Inderberg O. , Lunde E.H. 
Published: June 2014

Future subsea developments will to an ever greater extent be focused on the development of small and marginal fields. The utilization of experiences from previous development stages will be a kqy issue for these developments, as slim lining of the development concepts, strategies, the technology and the execution will have to be significant.

Experience and market situation has shown that the use of new technology will be important, as will new contract strategies, new project execution models, strategic alliances, organization and fast track developments.

This paper summarizes only some of the experiences of Kongsberg Offshore a.s to date and highlights areas for improvement as well as key areas with regards to technological advancement with a focus on project execution, intervention techniques and subsea multiphase metering.

Introduction

The situation today is that the elephants have been developed in some of the mature markets., e.g. US, North Sea, etc. and the more marginal fields remains for development.

There exists an uncertainty with respect to the oil price in addition to potentially great risk and relatively small reward when developing small and marginal fields.

Marginal economy is due to a variety of causes including using existing technology, existing ways of organizing developments and operational procedures. We need to be innovative in these areas in order to make the fields commercial.

The smaller and less accessible fields, deep waters, high pressure, increased distance to processing plants as some of the reasons causing a marginal economy. The subsea industry has, however, developed considerably in the last decade, which show how young the industry is.

We must find new and more cost effective field development solutions in order to meet the challenges of uncertain oil price and marginality of the fields.

As part of this industry, Kongsberg Offshore as. (KOS) has been involved in the subsea industry as it's main area of operation from the start in 1974, and has developed products for this industry serving a busy home market. Today the company operates within two business units, Subsea systems and Metering systems. The products developed include control systems, diverless intervention technology, complete subsea systems, metering systems including multiphase flow metering etc. All of which are of importance to enable the industry to meet the challenges set by the scenario described above. Other solutions to the needs foreseen is the development of a system approach and the organization of system engineering solutions that will be needed in the economic exploitation of marginal reserves since the field developments will need to be optimized relative to the operational and specific reservoirs needs.

The following sections will give examples of the technology developed and how this has been utilized and will outline experiences from some of the fieId development projects where KOS has been involved. The paper will also cover the experiences with different contract strategies and organizational forms used in the different projects.