Shell is to spend £500million in the southern North Sea in the next two years through its ONEgas business despite having been close to pulling out of the area, a conference in Norwich was told.
The firm is about to agree a contract for a new bridge-linked living quarters for its Clipper platform, has ordered new replacement compression for its Leman platform, is upgrading its Bacton terminal and is decommissioning its Inde Juliet installation – the last of six jackets in its area of the Inde field.
The key has been being able to operate more efficiently in order to make fields viable to invest in.
The difficulty in the basin is its maturity and the pressure on commerciality, Oliver Kline, ONEgas west projects manager, told EEEGR’s Southern North Sea conference.
ONEGas looks after about 90 fields and about 50 platforms on the UK and Netherlands.
“It is fair to say Shell looked at whether to stay here or not and what to do about it,” he said. “This is a really difficult area to keep such a large number of fields and facilities in production economically.
“If one or two wells on a platform can’t produce it makes the rest of the field uneconomic. That cut off for us has been fast approaching. But the potential is still out there.”
To make its assets more efficient – and therefore extend field life – the firm has taken a different approach to those assets, Jon O’Hara, Leman/SEAN cluster team leader at ONEgas, told Energy.
This sees it using a “factory approach”, like farming the fields, rather than carrying out ad-hoc individual pieces of intervention work.
It has a set programme going over its wells, where appropriate, with coiled tubing interventions, installing velocity strings and carrying out well maintenance.
“We are also doing a lot of surveillance to understand what is happening to wells and to understand other candidates for velocity strings,” he said. “It is about economies of scale, a factory approach. Some will only give a small amount of extra production but they will pay over the long term collectively.”
The method also means the firm is building up specialist teams, instead of where in the past it would have relied on consultants.