Chapter Fifteen - Field Development Opportunities

Abstract

High levels of decommissioning in the shallow-water GoM over the past decade have drawn attention to the important role of infrastructure in oil and gas production and raise questions regarding its impact on future development in the region. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the role of critical infrastructure, what’s important and why, and the nature of the business decisions of operators. Four tiers of infrastructure organize the discussion, and opportunities within and outside field development are discussed using conceptual economic-risk models. Within field opportunities are more easily ranked by cost and risk compared with outside field opportunities that involve a larger number of factors and higher levels of uncertainty. Project cost and risk for within field opportunities normally increase from workovers to redevelopment to secondary and tertiary production, and return on investment is usually smaller at each stage. Progressive deployment of evolving technologies is considered key to successful development. For investment opportunities that lie outside the field or lease boundary, project cost and risk are more complicated to evaluate and depend on additional factors. Without defined problem boundaries, system constraints, and field-specific data, outside field opportunities cannot be performed quantitatively and compared. The most critical offshore infrastructures are large producers, structures containing a high concentration of pipeline linkages or high volume throughput, and large-diameter high-volume pipelines.