Published by OilOnline

An Independent Project Analysis study is compiling Gulf of Mexico deepwater project data with an aim to increase project efficiency, according to an 17 February 2010 announcement. Since the beginning of 2010, the study has been collecting information on operator mistakes and successes in an attempt to make GoM deepwater projects more efficient and cost effective and decrease the gap between production promised and production delivered. Some operators have seen improvement in their fields by applying lessons learned to from past projects to current ones, according to IPA. According to early findings of an IPA-sponsored study, the fast learners can capture a 20% cost advantage per project on a dollar-per-barrel basis for wells and facilities scope.

Cost is not the only measure of project success, and the study will also measure the performance of this class of projects in terms of production delivered, as opposed to production promised at sanction. Historically the E&P industry has missed its first-year production promise by an average of 26%, according to IPA. IPA expects this metric to be more troublesome in deeper waters where hard cost/data acquisition trade-offs are made more frequently than in shallow waters. To that end, a specific component of the study's charter is to understand how effectively appraisals in the Lower Tertiary and subsalt trends have quantified risks to production profiles.

IPA will base its study on projects in greater than 300m of water and also focus on the subset of projects in greater than 1000m of water. Data from over 40 completed capital projects executed by eight American and European companies in the deepwater GoM will be included in the study. The study will also evaluate project performance based on scope-for-scope comparisons between projects executed by the supermajors and independents in the US GoM.

by: Trevor Demara,
tdemara@oilonline.com