Published: 03/15/2022
Published: 03/15/2022
West Africa has a fast-growing population and economy, and ambitious targets have been set to modernize and enhance the standard of living in the region. This growth has also led to a steep increase in the demand for energy. The operator of the field carried out a multibilliondollar integrated subsea development project to meet the growing demand and achieved first oil in just 2½ years—three months ahead of the development plan, a record time to market.
Inspired by the success, the operator made ambitious targets to quickly achieve first gas, with extensive drilling efforts to develop four deepwater gas wells to meet the timeline. However, before the publicly committed-to first-gas date, the operator experienced delays with the onshore processing facility that would disrupt electricity production and consequently lead to prolonged blackouts for the local population. The current facility capacity was not enough to handle high-rate gas wells, so the operator approached SLB to design and supply a debottlenecking solution within a one-month timeframe to ensure production continuity during the construction phase of the dedicated facility.
Part of the Production ExPRESS solutions portfolio, a debottlenecking solution was deployed to increase facility capacity. Combined with domain expertise, Production ExPRESS solutions enable quick and temporary deployment of existing SLB technologies to ensure continuity during planned and unexpected interruptions. The service delivery team designed, mobilized, and operated a bypass solution to serve as a temporary production facility, allowing processing of more than 100 MMcf/d of additional gas supply to customers.
The setup met the operator’s objectives while ensuring applicable safety standards were fully complied with. The operation entailed
A pumping package with nitrogen was supplied to conduct extensive leak and flow testing of the setup to verify integrity before commissioning and startup. A high-accuracy fiscal flowmeter was also supplied at the outlet of the facility, and services for meter installation, commissioning, and flow measurement were provided during operations.
With more than 20,000 work-hours and zero incidents, the project was successfully delivered within one month, avoiding penalties. The facility was operated with 100% uptime, delivering more than 100 MMcf/d of gas for more than 35 days to key electric generation plants. The unique setup provided the necessary expansion in production capacity—avoiding lost revenue and interrupted power supply vs. not deploying the interim solution.
Debottlenecking solution
An operator fast-tracks delivery of first gas using Production ExPRESS rapid production response solutions, integrating SLB domain expertise and existing surface well test equipment to deploy a temporary onshore processing facility while the dedicated facility was under construction. This enabled the operator to avoid lost revenue and interrupted power supply to local community vs. not deploying the interim solution.
