Expending Corporate Knowledge and Staff Capabilities to Address Complex Gas and Contaminated Hydrocarbon Field Development Challenges in the Sultanate of Oman
Authors: Noirot Jean-Christophe , Hamed Walid , Ghulam Junaid , Svec Robert , Cobanoglu Mustafa 
Published: November 2017

Achieving consistent optimum field development choices in technically complex portfolios requires sound individual and corporate technical capabilities. Within the largest Exploration and Production Company in the Sultanate of Oman, some key gas and contaminated hydrocarbon Field Development Plans are produced by dedicated specialized study teams that are part of the company's so-called Field Development Centre. In order to tackle projects involving technically complex challenges such as tight reservoirs, rich gas condensates, contaminated hydrocarbons or high pressure developments, a number of organizational elements are put in place to ensure continuous growth of staff and corporate capabilities along with corporate knowledge dissemination.

First, each project team remains integrated throughout its project life time. The integration of subsurface and surface disciplines allows early identification of realistic and robust development options. It also facilitates knowledge sharing with activities such as field visits conducted jointly between subsurface and surface engineers. The benefits of this integration are demonstrated with examples from several gas condensate and sour oil study cases.

Second, experienced professionals provide project specific guidance and coaching to junior staff over several projects. This scheme allows maximizing the impact of the experienced staff while allowing hands-on learning from younger recruits.

Third, benefiting from a ring-fenced organization to conduct studies facilitates the retention of corporate knowledge and the replication of best practices. However, this does not imply that knowledge and capabilities remain centralized as several conduits are in place to ensure dissemination across the organization. Asset staffs with identified technical development gaps are assigned for the duration of a project to the study team where they actually develop their skills through direct project contribution. Specialized forums, physical and web-based, are also available to share information and solutions learnt from previous projects.

Finally, fundamental technical capabilities and knowledge bases are developed at corporate level in order to consistently address key challenges encountered in various assets (e.g. gas condensate modeling and optimization, tight units recovery improvement, fraccing optimization and associated production forecasting). A wide scope integrated multi-year project covering all company gas activities within several formations has been kicked-off for this purpose. This fundamental project involves various contributors from the company such as Subject Matter Experts and experienced asset staff, specialized external service providers and academia. More specifically, the project aims at developing a comprehensive corporate understanding of its gas reservoirs, and at developing consistent datasets and validated effective modeling workflows to be disseminated through standards, websites and trainings.

This paper provides an overview of the work practices and tools that have been put in place within a large company in order to ensure the steady development of staff and corporate technical capabilities while consistently addressing the development of its most complex oil and gas reservoirs.