Developing today’s subsea fields continues to grow in complexity. Most prospects are smaller yet located in deeper waters, with deeper well targets, located father from shore, and in colder regions. As a result, sanctioning projects in the current oil price environment is challenging, and adopting efficient field development plan (FDP) processes is essential to making projects viable.

A fast-track FDP platform has been developed and used with great success on numerous projects worldwide. The platform integrates layout development and equipment selection with fully integrated pore to process simulation, establishes an excellent collaboration platform for the development team, and fully enables close collaboration between teams that traditionally do not work closely together. Subsea production system (SPS) and subsea umbilical, riser, and flowline (SURF) specialists can now work closely together with reservoir, production, and drilling engineers, ensuring the development of optimal solutions early in the FDP process while enabling the teams to overcome challenges that have previously been imposed by the segregation of the different technical disciplines. The key feature of this process is rapid, accurate scenario generation—that is, much shorter time from initial layout development to life-of-field production profiles that maximize overall economic performance for the project.

The experience gathered to date clearly demonstrates that a fully integrated approach to field development is crucial for implementing the optimal development concept that maximizes returns on investment.