Subsea Expo: Small pools clock ticking

Feb 4, 2016

Unlocking small pools of oil and gas on the UK Continental Shelf could open up £20 billion capital investment – but the clock is ticking, Subsea Expo heard.

Studies have shown there are some 210 so-called small pools in the UK North Sea, most in the central North Sea (69), followed by the Moray Firth (46), southern North Sea (40), northern north Sea (34), west of Shetland (10) and East Irish Sea (9). Total recoverable reserves from those fields amount to 1-1.6 billion boe.

But, costs need to be taken out and new technologies introduced, from subsea separation to down-sized enhanced oil recovery, to make these fields developable, says Matt Nicol, director of production and non-operated assets at Centrica Energy. Some 50% of the cost is in drilling alone, he told Subsea Expo’s plenary session in Aberdeen yesterday.

“If 50% of the cost of drilling, subsea technology and brownfield modifications can be achieved, there is a huge opportunity in to the UK,” he said. “If we could reduce capital costs to unlock these pools by 50%, we would be able to reduce the field size at which they would be economic to produce to 6 MMboe. At that number, we would be able to unlock 150 of those 210 fields.

“If they become economic, £20 billion of capital investment opens up and we would be able to unlock and produce 1 billion boe. Additionally, it would have a positive impact on exploration programs and extend life of existing assets. It would also have a positive impact on the supply chain.”

“These are not exploration plays,” he added. “These are discoveries already made by others. That’s the potential. That’s the prize.

The issue is being looked at by the Technology Leadership Board, which set out the 50% cost reduction challenge and has held two hackathons (a term taken from the IT industry) with industry to generate ideas towards this goal. Main themes around the challenges to achieving the goal were also set out and include: fluid comingling, differential pressure, gas dispersal, and low energy fields.

The hackathons generated some 200 ideas and the result were some short term goals, strategic initiatives, a possible joint industry project and longer term goals.

In the short term, standardization, simplification, plug and play technologies and revisiting the CRINE (cost reduction in a new era) initiated in the 1980s could be looked at. Strategic initiatives included subsea storage and transfer, subsea processing, and stand along projects.

Possible joint industry projects included looking at hot taps, design attitudes, flow meter technologies, and subsea boosting. Longer term research goals were separation, flow assurance, biological cleaning, and down-sized EOR.

The next steps, says Nicol, are to create robust investment cases and matching technology suppliers with demand. “2016 is going to be incredible important period as we start the process to bring these technologies closer to market, which will be critical to unlocking these small pools,” he said.

Chris Bird, managing director at MOL UK, said: “For a bigger operator perspective, it’s not necessarily just the small pools in isolation. By bringing those small pools in to bigger assets you bring down the unit costs which gives us time to look at what to do with those assets in the longer term. If we don’t do small pools, if a few years’ time we wont have the infrastructure there.”