Subsea: Aker BP's response to a volatile world
Speaking at the Energy Cluster Norway stand at ONS in Stavanger last week, Kristin Høines Helgesen from Aker BP responded to how the subsea industry can navigate a volatile world.
Costs are climbing. The fix she presented was about making things simple, standard, shared and secure.
The numbers don't lie
“Volatility” hits project economics directly, and hard.
Helgesen pointed to that industry costs rose by around 20 per cent between 2022 and 2025. Vessel day rates climbed by more than 30 per cent over the same period. Meanwhile, investment on the Norwegian Continental Shelf is expected to decline towards 2030.
Most of the large, straightforward discoveries have already been made. What’s left tends to be smaller, more marginal fields, often sitting close to existing infrastructure, but not necessarily viable to develop the old way.
The resources and infrastructure is there. What’s missing is a model that makes the numbers work according to Helgesen.
Complexity is where the money goes
The industry should rethink how projects get designed and delivered from the very start.
Helgesen pointed to five levers that the industry should focus on: bare-bones solutions, standardisation, technology- and supplier-agnostic design, security of supply and capacity, and stronger partnerships and alliances.
“Complexity is where cost and schedule accumulate,” she said.
Developments should start with what the reservoir actually needs, not what’s nice to have.
–Every extra feature has to earn its place in the design instead of being included by default, said Helgesen.
Standardisation pushes that further. Repeatable building blocks turn each new development from a bespoke engineering exercise into something closer to a predictable delivery model.
Open protocols and agnostic design add flexibility, so equipment can be reused, swapped or reconfigured as conditions shift.
Halving the time from discovery to first oil
Aker BP’s future portfolio is increasingly made up of marginal fields and subsea tie-backs. The ambition is to halve the time from discovery to first oil, while cutting development costs significantly.
Three areas are meant to get them there: standardisation and industrialisation, more efficient workflows, and integration through alliances.
Aker BP is building a catalogue of simplified, bare-bones delivery blocks designed to cover at least 80 per cent of its portfolio. Instead of starting every project from scratch, the default flips: start from the standard solution, and justify any deviation from it.
Reuse is the other major piece
“When margins are thin, the cheapest and fastest equipment is the equipment you already own.”
Rather than buying new for every development, Aker BP wants to make greater use of what’s already installed and design new equipment with future reuse in mind from day one. For marginal subsea tiebacks, the effect can be substantial: lower capital expenditure, lower break-even costs, shorter schedules, and a faster route to first oil.
Collaboration as a competitive edge
Technology and engineering alone won’t get the industry there. The commercial model needs to pull in the same direction, with incentives that reward standardisation and reuse rather than unnecessary customisation.
That extends past individual projects too. Helgesen pointed to collaboration between operators – shared industry standards, joint procurement of scarce resources and capacity. With vessel and installation capacity under real pressure, this isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s what makes the industry more resilient when the market shifts.
Through it all, one thing stays non-negotiable, safety. Standardisation and reuse are meant to make developments faster and cheaper – never at the expense of health, safety and the environment according to Helgesen.
Helgesen summed it up in four words: Simple. Standard. Shared. Secure.
The conversation continues in Bergen
These are the same questions the global subsea community will dig into when it meets in Bergen for the Underwater Technology Conference (UTC), 15–17 June 2027.
Under the theme “Subsea Success in a Volatile World,” UTC 2027 brings together operators, suppliers, technology companies and industry experts to explore how technology, innovation and new ways of working can create real impact in a fast-changing industry.
