Wireline Issue 46 - Autumn 2019

Total staff during the hookup phase.

With that in mind, it is all the more impressive that the drilling team exceeded expectations, bringing four wells online in the time initially allotted for three. “That allows us to reach our production plateau slightly

earlier than was planned,” he adds. Drilling and upskilling

In the middle of all this, there was the minor matter of Maersk’s acquisition by Total. Despite the complexity and scale of the corporate transaction, Claus describes it as a good match and has found a company structure that has been “very accommodating.” Given that progress at the Culzean field was already far underway, Maersk Oil’s plans remained relatively ring- fenced from wider changes within the organisation. Nevertheless, he says, “Total holds a lot of expertise in HPHT development, so they were quite diligent in looking at what we were doing and how we were doing it.” Even prior to its relationship with Total, however, Maersk was building expertise within its team to deal with the challenges of developing an HPHT reservoir. The wider industry was happy to pass on knowledge, as Claus recalls: “We started out as Maersk Oil being new to HPHT developments, so we paid a lot of attention to detail and we took all the learnings from industry that we could find. We had quite a few helping hands from industry around best practices and we tried to put that into force and implement them.” While the newbuild rig brought with it a host of mod-cons and cutting-edge technology, it also meant assembling a new team, who took time to bed in. Claus notes that Maersk conducted a lot of work around competency, planning and preparedness with the drilling crews, which played a major part in delivering results. Ultimately, he says: “What we’ve seen is excellent drilling performance from Maersk Drilling, and it’s quite complimentary given the fact that it’s both a new rig crew and a new rig.” He attributes this performance to good processes, and the application of experience as the project progressed. “It was due to planning, preparation and essentially performance management of the wells,” he continues. “We’ve taken on the learnings and we have managed to learn and be more efficient as we complete every well.” Key to that planning was the optimisation of drilling processes, one influential decision being the batch drilling of wells — i.e. drilling all the required top holes before moving onto the individual wells. “Obviously, that’s a feature you can apply on a new project where you start on a greenfield, so there’s a benefit in starting from scratch,” he adds. Local support Contracting for Culzean and working in partnership with UK supply chain companies has also been an important element of the project. As well as major contractors such as Sembcorp, MODEC, Subsea 7

“We started out as Maersk Oil being new to HPHT developments, so we paid a lot of attention to detail and took all the learnings we could find."

Culzean Project Director Claus Vissing-Jorgensen

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