Technology Standardization Remains Elusive

There are strong arguments for standardization when developing a new technology. The hard part is getting competitors in the oil industry to agree on the standard to apply when faced with a new challenge in which there is no accepted solution.

An OTC panel discussion put together by Deepstar, an industry-backed organization that fosters innovative ways to overcome barriers to deepwater developments, kept coming back to the need for greater cooperation when faced with new challenges.

  • “The profession has to resist the entropic trend toward complexity increase,” said Alain Goulois, vice president of reservoir development at Total.
  • “We know if we do something over and over that you get good at something and costs go down,” said John Gremp, chairman and CEO of FMC Technologies.
  • “More standards will allow the industry to move toward zero defects,” said Stephen Thurston, vice president of deepwater exploration at Chevron.
  • “I do not believe you cannot have standardization and innovation,” said Solange Guedes, an executive manager at Petrobras.
  • “If we cannot agree on standards, we will be deciding on everything the first time every time,” said Kevin Kennelley, vice president of technology at BP Global Projects.

The topic is a constant concern for Kennelley, who is heading an initiative at BP called Project 20K to develop, test, and certify the next generation of equipment for dealing with high-pressure (from 15,000 to 20,000 psi), high-temperature (up to 350°F) wells. The project is based on the high-pressure/high-temperature challenges presented by three areas around the globe, including the enormous reserves in the US Gulf of Mexico trend known to some companies as the Lower Tertiary, and to others as the Paleogene.

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Solange Guedes, an executive manager at Petrobras, said setting design standards for subsea components used offshore Brazil has not hindered innovation. 

That semantic divide is an indication of the difficulties involved in getting exploration and production experts to agree on standard approaches when confronted by a frontier presenting a generation of problems, such as the Lower Tertiary, where wells in waters approaching 10,000 ft are drilled into formations where the pressures are extremely high but the permeability is relatively low.

In the Lower Tertiary, the list of equipment that will need to be upgraded is long, from towering stacks of blowout preventers down to the gaskets in the many connections that need to stand up to the increased pressure. Kennelley is working to simplify the transition by getting the many experts involved to agree on some standards. “When I talk about the value of standardization to people, they say, ‘I agree with you, and you should use mine,’ ” he said.

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Stephen Thurston of Chevron, second from right, discusses the value of industry collaboration on technology development with panelists on the panel presented by DeepStar. The panelists, from left, are: Alain Goulois, Total; John Gremp, FMC Technologies; Kevin Kennelley, BP; Thurston; and Occo Roelofsen, McKinsey & Co. 

For Project 20K, BP is working with Maersk and KBR on engineering studies to guide work through the end of the decade, he said. The hope is that some of those products and approaches will be used industrywide.

“Collaboration with competing peers can be difficult—it can be easier to work through suppliers,” Kennelly said. Those service companies are also typically the biggest spenders on new technology development.

ConocoPhillips is rebuilding its deepwater development portfolio using money raised by asset sales. As it searches the globe for deepwater discoveries, it is already trying to anticipate what tools it will need to effectively explore them and shorten the time it takes to begin producing them.

“By the time you know what you are going to do, it is too late to decide how to do it,” said Ram Chenoy, chief technology officer at ConocoPhillips. Shortening the gap between discovery and production has become an increasingly important consideration for host countries when deciding which bidders will be granted exploration blocks.

An example of anticipating needs was the collaboration between Chevron and Halliburton that led to an improved version of a completion tool designed to speed the job of fracturing and gravel packing deep wells in the Lower Tertiary. Thurston said the work began about 5 years ago because Chevron anticipated that completing formations with multiple producing zones within a 1,000‑ft segment would be time consuming using techniques available at that time. A recent study showed that Chevron saved an average of 18 days per well, or about USD 18 million per well based on typical rig rates, on three well completions using Halliburton’s Enhanced Single-Trip Multizone System.

As new tools come along, they need to be tested to see if they can withstand extreme conditions. The current industry standard requires new tools or equipment to pass multiple tests by companies that often impose different performance criteria. And component testing may fail to answer the big question: What happens when components are assembled? “When you put things together into a system, they can work in surprising ways,” said Kennelley, “so it’s important to qualify and test the systems.”