In a World Short on Big Discoveries, Offshore Oil Companies May Need To Double Down on Intervention Work

There’s an old cliché in the upstream business that may be increasingly worth repeating. “The best place to find oil is in an oil field,” attribution unknown.

Among the industry groups that have always held this old chestnut close to heart is the subsea well intervention community. For decades, this niche business has fought to make its case to offshore oil companies that reinvesting just a fraction of the original capex spent on what are often multibillion-dollar assets is very much worth it.

There is also a new and mounting pressure on oil companies to sustain production from existing offshore fields as it becomes increasingly difficult to find new ones big enough to justify major infrastructure investments.

This message was made by several speakers to those attending the recent SPE Subsea Well Intervention Symposium in Galveston, Texas.

Dave Wilson, vice president of investor relations at global energy services company Expro, said “the industry is being asked to produce more energy molecules with fewer people, less resources” and that well intervention offers a way to do so more efficiently.

He noted that a decade’s worth of infrastructure is already in place, wells represent significant sunk costs, and relatively modest investments can generate large returns.

Wilson said that when speaking with investors about the upstream sector, he compares new projects to planting a tree, while brownfield assets are like a mature tree with fruit still waiting to be harvested. Subsea intervention offers companies a cost-effective way to “go back into the well and pick the rest of the fruit,” he said, adding that the future of the business is centered on asset optimization. “Optimize doesn’t mean necessarily spend less—it means spend wisely.”

Among the others making the case for well intervention, and cheaper ways to do it, was a supermajor.

Engineers from BP presented SPE 234212, which outlines how the company reduced its well intervention costs at its Alantis platform in the US Gulf of Mexico from more than $100 million per multiwell campaign in 2017 to below $25 million by 2023. On a per-well basis, the company went from spending more than $15 million to less than $1 million.

The company lowered its costs by transitioning from offshore drilling rigs for intervention to a purpose-built intervention semisubmersible and later to light intervention vessels. But the real cost breakthrough came after the company leveraged its platform’s own pumping abilities and a subsea manifold to deliver remediation chemicals from low-cost supply vessels.

Leah Chatelain, the production management team lead for BP’s Atlantis asset, did not disclose exact figures but said overall production following the new well work program exceeded the company’s expectations.