Woodside chief operations officer Michael Utsler told Energy News on the sidelines of the AOG in Perth last week that the ability to link smaller pools to existing infrastructure and stretching the boundaries of the possible using new subsea technologies were "critical", and were among the new tech that excited him the most.
Utsler said these new technologies had helped enable Woodside to start talking about expanding Pluto recently.
While the Norwegians have put compression on the seabed, Utsler said the technology was still largely untested on a global basis.
His technology development manager - upstream, Nino Fogliani, outlined the results of Woodside's subsea gas processing investigations at AOG's Subsea Forum- including cooling, separation, chemical injection and compression/pumping - to condition wellstream fluids for long distance subsea transportation.
Detailing gas processing case studies, including subsea gas dehydration and gas cycling, Fogliani said it was clear that with only rudimentary processing "using simple and robust unit operations, wellstream fluids can be conditioned sufficiently for subsea transportation over hundreds of kilometres, even facilitating direct tieback to shore".
"This promises to radically change the current orthodoxy, leading to disruptive enhancement of offshore field developments and the emergence of leaner, fitter solutions," Fogliani said.
In between Fogliani talking and Chevron's "subsea factory champion" Mark Wagstaff speaking about how the supermajor faced similar issues with long-distance tiebacks with any oil that may come out of its proposed Ceduna Basin campaign, the Norwegian official who chaired the subsea session told delegates that "compression works", and had the potential to be game-changing.
Utsler compared the importance of such technologies to horizontal drilling, saying the impacts would be similar, particularly considering 25% of the world's production is expected to come from subsea fields by 2030.
"About eight years into my career as a drilling engineer somebody said ‘we'd like you to drill a horizontal well'," he recalled.
His response was that it would be difficult to take the casing and turn it 90 degrees.
"Within five years people were saying ‘why aren't you drilling a horizontal well?'" he said.
"The whole principal of shale gas/oil developments were driven off the back of being able to achieve low-cost horizontal wells.
"I started in the US' Western Desert in Wyoming as a drilling engineer drilling wells to about 3500m deep. It took us on average nine months and cost about between $US30-50 million. That same area today spud to completion is 10 days at $2 million.
"It's the same with subsea water management and separation."
Yet while technologies are now being deployed, new developments are held back by the fact that whoever leads must pay a premium.
"Almost invariably in our industry [for] those on the leading edge of technology typically is twice the cost of the next generation of fast followers," Utsler said.
"So you know you're going to pay a premium to lead, but someone has to lead."
More potential
He said developing small pool tie-backs to existing infrastructure using small-scale brownfields developments could also open up new opportunities just as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing put blew the "Peak Oil" theory out of the water.
"There is 30-35Tcf which have been discovered and developed, and another 30Tcf-plus discovered and undeveloped just in the North West Shelf," Utsler said.
"If that's the view today, there's another 30-50Tcf that is either technologically or economically today not yet discovered and identified that will ultimately come to play.
"Having worked in most of the biggest oil and gas basins around the world through their discovery through to late-life, and you go in thinking there's 30Tcf and end up with 100Tcf technologically speaking.
"When I entered the industry in 1970 there was supposedly 50 years of oil left in the world, 10 years later there was 75 years, 10 years later there's 110 years, 10 years later it's 150 years.
"It's about location, technology, supply chain cost and market demand, and we absolutely believe market demand will continue to grow over the next several decades, and several other parties are now saying the same things - that we're seeing a likely acceleration of demand outstripping supply earlier than what we were saying just a year ago, into the 2020s."
