Your company recently made a discovery just a few kilometers away from your existing plant.
Initial work indicates that 15 wells must be drilled over the new field, which you want to tie back to your existing plant.
You are about to produce a Field Development Plan and you are about to update your company's Business Plan.
But have you discussed this with a Process Engineer?
A common mistake, amongst small and medium size Oil and Gas operating companies, is to produce Field Development Plans and update Business Plans without asking one simple question: can my
existing plant take the additional production?
Plans are prepared, budgets are allocated, public annoucements are made, resources are mobilised, wells are drilled, flowlines are installed, but production fails to increase significantly.
Why? Because the existing processing facility does not have sufficient capacity to handle the extra production.
Another common mistake, amongst small and medium size Oil and Gas operating companies, is to rush into assuming that a totally new facility is required to process the new field, without
asking one simple question: does my plant have spare capacity such as to allow the production of the new field?
Plans are prepared, budgets are allocated, projects are set up, resources are mobilised, wells are drilled, a new plant is constructed, and large amounts of money are wasted. Why? Because
the existing processing facility could have allowed to produce part or all of the extra production coming from the new field.
Talking to an Operations Support Process Engineer would have allowed, in both cases, to save a lot of money.
How?
The Operations Support Process Engineer would have been able to assess whether there is spare capacity in the existing plant. There would then have been several possibilities:
- There is enough spare capacity to process all of the extra production coming from the new field. In this case, there would have been no requirement for a new facility.
- There is spare capacity to process part of the extra production coming from the new field. In this case, a new facility would have been required to process only the part of the extra production that the existing facility cannot take.
- There is spare capacity to process part of the extra production coming from the new field in the short term, and there is spare capacity to process all of the extra production in the longer term. In this case, a phased development of the new field through the existing facility may be envisaged.
- There is no spare capacity in the existing facility. In this case, the justification for a totally new facility would be justified.
A good business plan takes account of real field constraints.
A Process Engineer supporting Operations departments is a valuable asset in ensuring that business objectives are met.
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