Now is the time for collaboration and new technology – NSRI

The National Subsea Research Institute (NSRI), the technology arm of Subsea UK, has made the news today, warning that more than a billion barrels of oil could remain locked in the North Sea unless a new approach is taken to develop small pools.  The NSRI have headed up the Technology Leadership Board (TLB) working group which focuses on what they term “small pools”, hydrocarbon fields with less than 15 million boe.  Today they have released the results of two hackathon events carried out late 2015, to identify ways of unlocking these assets.

Quoted in today’s Energy Voice, Gordon Drummond, NSRI’s Project Director, has called for the industry to work more collaboratively to ‘speed up the development of near to market technologies to extend the life of the UKCS’, a message we wholeheartedly support which reiterates a point highlighted in the Wood Review in February 2014, that maximising recovery will only be achieved through the use of new technology and approaches which can deliver the cost reductions required.  In difficult times it is encouraging to see that the industry is recognising that there are cost-effective solutions, which in our case utilise technologies already proven and in use, that can be implemented now to help secure these resources.  Furthermore, we must continue to evolve as innovations become mature rather than standing still.

Gordon also repeats the call for collaboration between supply chain and operators, including across projects, a message which has been the clarion call at every event and conference for two years. We established the Consortium because we recognised the huge value of collaborating with companies who have different specialisms but a single, consistent approach. Furthermore, for fields of the size the small pools working group are discussing, collaboration will need to extend to how different operators develop their fields either as clusters or in sequential field developments, both of which MFDevCo have advocated in previous studies.

It will be interesting to see where NSRI and the working group go next and how quickly their recommendations are implemented for undeveloped small pools.  Even more urgently, the clock is ticking for many much larger fields in the North Sea, where Oil and Gas UK claim that 20% of production is losing money even at $50 per barrel, and worldwide.