Digital Field Development Planning: A Collaboration Between Technology & Process to Enable Fast and Efficient Field Development Planning
Authors: Bin Md Karim Mohd Aminuddin 
Published: October 2021

O&G industry is facing difficult business climate with many uncertainties and challenges. Companies including National Oil Companies, NOCs have to be more efficient particularly in developing fields. The challenge is to create an environment to allow E&P companies to efficiently optimize their Field Development Plan, FDP processes and align with technology that enables integration & collaboration between different E&P domains. The environment should be agile to allow changing of circumstances while providing in-depth understanding of the risks and uncertainties involved. PETRONAS has a large portfolio of domestic and international oil & gas assets and is one of the leading NOCs in the world. With the ongoing potential of uncertainty of oil price, it is even more important to fast track field development planning while understanding the risk across domains and recognizing value from investments.

PETRONAS has embarked on a digital field development pilot project called Live FDP that enriches internal existing FDP processes & tools to provide integration and generate efficiencies across multi-discipline in E&P workflows and systems that leverage on capabilities enabled by a Digital Cloud based solution. The Digital Planning Application methodology starts with Project Orchestration: Building FDPs using multi-disciplinary inputs and sensitivities followed by managing and framing via capturing an opportunity framework and concept decision. The process will then lead to generating multiple scenarios and evaluations for development options via seamless connectivity and integration with other systems in an Open Platform. At this point, process automation via connectivity of technical domain inputs to Value Based Decision Making will take place alongside Data Discovery & Benchmarks, underpinned by insights, Optimization & Advisory. The Data Analytics will then enable powerful business intelligence & analytics reporting capabilities translated into a Digital Dashboard: alignment with the UPMS process and management systems. Such systems allow project maturation to be completed fast and thus future scalability with expansion apart from Development phase to other phases such as Exploration, Drilling, Facility & Business Planning Workflows can be implemented.

Based on recent internal evaluation on a pilot project in Peninsular Malaysia, by conducting Live FDP, the process efficiency in FDP evaluation scenarios was improved by up to 50% while simulation runs were shortened from 2 hrs to 20mins. On top of that, Integration & Collaboration involving benchmarking capability and via Data Ecosystem that allow cross domain collaboration between departments. This provides business continuity through data log for auditing purpose, single source of truth that leads to the increase of confidence and less uncertainties with breadth of multiple scenarios that allow techno-commercial evaluations and benchmarking with internal and external data.

This paper will open up the mindset on the ways of how FDP can be developed with a new digital application that improves the project efficiency involving online cloud-based technology that allows multiple iterative processes in both technical and commercial aspects of the project. This is the new way of working that suits the difficult business climate that the O&G industry is currently facing.