Fuente: REUTERS |
Crude prices
have more than halved since mid-2014, forcing companies to cut billions of
dollars in costs. Determined to shield dividends and preserve the
infrastructure that will allow them to compete and grow if the market recovers,
they are increasingly looking to smarter tech and design to make savings.
French oil
and gas major Total said it was now using drones to carry out detailed
inspections on some of its oil fields following a trial at one of its
Elgin/Franklin platforms in the North Sea.
Cyberhawk,
the drone company that led the trial, said this kind of work was previously
carried out by engineers who suspended themselves from ropes at dizzying
heights. It said the manned inspection used to take seven separate two-week
trips with a 12-man team that had to be flown in and accommodated on site.
The drones
do the work in two days and at about a tenth of the cost, according to the
Britain-based firm's founder Malcolm Connolly, who said it had also worked with
ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP.
Total
declined to comment on how long the manned or drone inspections took, or
specify how much money was saved.
Statoil's
giant Johan Sverdrup field, the largest North Sea oil find in three decades
which is due to start production in 2019, is a leading industry case study for
cutting costs in the era of cheap oil.
The
Norwegian company has cut its development costs for the first stage of the
project by a fifth compared with estimates given in early 2015, to 99 billion
crowns ($12.2 billion).
The savings
have largely been made by focusing on the most efficient technology and designs
from the beginning, Statoil's head of technology Margareth Oevrum told Reuters
in an interview.
Executives
say the growing attention on technologies that have been around for some time
shows how wasteful the global industry had been in the years before the
downturn when - with crude at above $100 a barrel delivering bumper profits -
oil companies' had little incentive to develop fields efficiently.
For
example, simply finding a more efficient route for the oil pipeline that would
carry the crude from the Sverdrup field to the onshore refinery cut 1 billion
crowns, Statoil said.
ROBOTS, FOAM
Statoil has
also developed a drilling "template" that is acting as a guide for
the first eight wells to be drilled at the field. It said it had reduced the
overall drilling time by more than 50 days, saving about 150 million crowns per
production well compared with what it would have cost with 2013 techniques.
"By
far the biggest driver (of savings) has been simplification," said Oevrum.
"To think much simpler and start from the bottom, or the bare bone, and
then rather add to that, instead of starting very big."
The company
could not give a figure for its group savings made from improved technology and
design. But it said that, partly because of such innovations, projects set to
start production by 2022 would be able to make a profit with an oil price at
$41 a barrel, down from $70 in 2013.
Global
upstream - exploration and production - oil and gas spending has fallen by more
than $300 billion across the industry in 2015-16, according to the
International Energy Agency (IEA), roughly equivalent to the annual GDP of
South Africa. Around two-thirds comes from cost cuts, rather than cancelling or
shelving projects, it said.
Shell, for
example, has developed a new type of pipe, called a steel lazy wave riser, to
carry oil and gas from its deepwater Stones field in the Gulf
of Mexico for processing. It bends to absorb the motion of the sea
and the floating platform, which the company says boosts production at extreme
depths.
The
Anglo-Dutch major could not say how much the pipes contributed to increased
efficiency, but said innovations at Stones had played a significant part in
cost savings of $1.8 billion in its projects and technology division last year
- equivalent to the 2015 core profits in its upstream division.
The fall in
oil prices has led to the introduction of other new engineering and maintenance
techniques.
Chevron is
using a robotic device to clean and check the inside of pipelines on their
Erskine field in the North Sea more quickly.
The improvement has helped raise the field's daily production rate to the
highest in two years.
Oil
services firm Amec Foster Wheeler, working for BG Group which is now part of
Shell, has applied a new technique to remove the pillars of an old platform, a
procedure that is often dangerous because corroded elements can slip off.
It pumped
in expanding foam to hold the pillar's elements together, allowing workers to
safely cut the metal away. This work took just over seven weeks instead of the
22 weeks typically needed using traditional methods.
Alex
Brooks, oil and gas equity analyst at Canaccord Genuity, said tech innovation in
the industry was about "100 tiny things", adding: "The bottom
line is you end up with a much lower cost."
The
downturn has presented opportunities for some services firms that can offer
cost-saving innovations. Inspection drone firm Cyberhawk, for instance, said
its revenue from oil and gas had doubled from mid-2014 to mid-2016, while the
wider inspection market had shrunk.
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