Innovation is rooted in collaboration. Take the crazy idea that the Earth is round. Centuries of debate—mostly civil—ensued before Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin took a short trip into outer space in 1961 and could provide visual confirmation that our planet was not pancake-flat.
Even the bizarre notion that humans could fly, much less travel into space, was made possible with collaboration. From DaVinci’s vision of the helical aerial screw to a NASA-controlled rocket putting a man on the moon five centuries later, it is easy to see that society has benefited greatly from the innovations nurtured through collaboration.
It is the same spirit of innovation and collaboration that pushed hydrocarbon E&P off the shelf and into the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) deep water. And it is that spirit that Hess embraces through its use of Lean thinking to help safely and efficiently manage all its projects, both onshore and offshore. There is much ado about Lean, but converts to it are common after the validity of its principles and methodologies are confirmed by its successes. In West Africa, for example, seven of the 10 wells the company drilled in its deepwater campaign that used Lean were, according to Hess COO Greg Hill, by far among the best wells drilled by the industry in West Africa, with the last well drilled recording zero nonproductive time.
A little closer to home the company is leveraging Lean and using the lessons learned and efficiencies gained to meet its goal of bringing first oil production to the Stampede oil and gas development in the GoM.
Stampeding into 2018
Located 185 km (115 miles) south of Fourchon, La., in Green Canyon lease blocks 468, 511 and 512, the Stampede Field is in about m (3,500 ft) of water, with a reservoir depth of 9,144 m (30,000 ft), according to the company.
Plans for the production facilities include subsea production and injection wells tied back to a single tension- leg platform (TLP), with a gross processing capacity of 80 Mbbl/d oil and 100 Mbbl/d water injection capacity, according to the company.
Total gross recoverable resources for Stampede are estimated in the range of 300 MMboe to 350 MMboe. Hess holds a 25% working interest and is operator, with Union Oil Co. of California, a Chevron subsidiary; Statoil Gulf of Mexico LLC; and Nexen Petroleum Offshore U.S.A. Inc. each holding a 25% working interest in the field.
Sanctioned in 2014, the project successfully passed its first physical milestone in late November 2015 when the first of 12 120-m-long (395-ft-long) anchor piles were successfully hammered 114 m (375 ft) into the soft clay seabed. Twelve days later, installation of the final pile was completed, four days earlier than planned.
That four-day savings was made possible through the use of core Lean principles: meticulous planning to identify all waste, eliminating that waste and engaging everyone involved on the project early and often.
Indeed, the time saved was all the more notable—and arguably greater—given the team’s ability to safely and successfully execute the job despite unforeseen, challenging and severe loop current conditions that would have resulted in substantial downtime.
Rolling start
As the saying goes, there is no “I” in team, and for the Stampede project there is no operator team or contractor team; there is just the Stampede team. By engaging with its project contractors early and often, the company is able to identify and put in mitigation measures before an issue snowballs into a monumental delay.
“Early engagement with the contractors started at the beginning of 2013,” said Steve Whitaker, project director of the Stampede Deepwater Development for Hess. “We set ourselves on what we called a P0 schedule; it’s where we’ve taken the contingencies out. In a sense, it is like skiing in that you are leaning forward on your skis. It’s dynamic, and if you’re not used to it, it can be uncomfortable. But what it does from a project management perspective is give us great line of sight of all potential problems that could come at us before they do. It gave, even as the project went through the early-phase FEED, a line of sight on all issues that I could address without putting the project under undue schedule pressure.”
By the time the project reached sanction in 2014, through its engagement with its project co-owners and with the contractors, everybody was aligned internally, he added.
“We have a very open and transparent way of working here. The co-owners are involved on a very regular basis with the team, and we are leaning forward with the schedule where we try to address issues as they come forward. When we got to the co-owner sanction, we were already cutting steel for the TLP topsides about a month before we had their sanction because we had their support and agreement,” he said. “It’s like the rolling start used in NASCAR, where the cars roll through the starting line rather than from the standing start used in Formula One racing.”
That rolling start has really helped the project stay on schedule.
“We’ve maintained that schedule over these four years. It is going to get more difficult as we move into the next couple of years,” Whitaker said. “Unlike before, where there was flexibility in the timing of our plans, now there is limited flexibility as activities line up on the critical path.”
The first milepost on that critical path to completion was to install the anchor piles in sets of three at four locations, and accomplishing that in 2015 was high on the plan for a host of reasons, with safety as the most important.
“Traditionally, piles could be installed in the six to eight months ahead of when the structure goes out,” he said. “If we had waited, then we put the team into a pattern where there is more equipment on the seabed that they could impact or damage if we had a problem, with 400 more people out there at the same time we have our two drillships operating. By going in 2015, I’m keeping people out of harm’s way.”
The team follows the “SQDC” motto underpinning Lean thinking: safety, quality, delivery and cost.
“Our view is that safety and quality are the leading metrics,” Whitaker said. “They tell you how to go forward, while delivery and cost are the lagging metrics. They tell outcomes rather than inputs. So the message from me to the team is focus—if you focus entirely on the safety of the work that you’re doing and are passionate that a safe project is a good project, and if you focus on doing it right the first time so the quality is solid—[then] you will have good delivery and you will have good cost.”
Hess embraces that philosophy and wants its contractors to do so as well. The company is working with all key Stampede contractors, including fabrication and drilling and completions contractors, to introduce Lean thinking and work collaboratively so that they can apply Lean themselves in their businesses to ensure safety is the priority, remove waste and become more efficient.
“That’s how we try to approach every issue that we have. It’s just focus on getting everyone, everywhere, every day, home safe,” Whitaker said. “We really try to work to that. We’ve had a very positive safety record at KOS [Kiewit Offshore Services]. They’ve been exemplary. We also had a very good safety record at Samsung, where we built the hull.”
石油圈
