Driving Project Efficiency and Cost Control in the Upstream Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract

Management Today’s upstream oil and gas companies are focused on keeping pace with growing demand and driving incremental revenues by exploiting hydrocarbon reserves. This trend is particularly marked in fast-emerging, dynamic new markets such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China where operators are aggressively pursuing new market opportunities both domestically and further afield. These opportunities include finding and developing new reserves, and equally extending the production life of existing assets. Achieving these goals presents a range of related challenges to operators. New exploration has the inherent risk of finding new reservoirs, can be very expensive, and often takes place in challenging locations. The Macondo well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico has painfully reminded the industry of the risk and challenges. By extending the life of existing assets and production systems, the risk of the resource base is minimized and the location challenges are at least known. Oil and gas production is notoriously complex to manage and difficult to optimize due to the sometimes unpredictable nature of reservoirs. As with exploration, carefully managing expenses is always a challenge, even more so as operational costs continue to rise, while the internal expertise becomes increasingly scarce as a experienced workforce retires. Together, these trends are stimulating demand for a potent combination of technology and talent. Operators require high-quality process engineering solutions to address complexity of operations, which are accurate, robust, easy to use, and help drive user productivity. The best of these solutions are capable of delivering engineering efficiency throughout the design lifecycle whether they are used to help achieve minor modifications and revamps to facilities, or to deliver efficiency across the world’s largest mega-projects. Discipline in Capital Spending and Managing the Asset Lifecycle Getting to “first oil” as quickly as possible is important, but choosing the right assets to develop is equally critical. Fortunately, to support these business objectives operating companies can now draw on a range of process engineering, cost estimating, and integrated engineering solutions. Engineering technology helps operators throughout the oil and gas industry control capital spending and stay on schedule when designing and building assets. In this capital-intensive business, getting oil reserves into production sooner enables organizations to achieve their return on investment objectives.