Identifying £130 million of improvement opportunities for a North Sea oil producer

How do we improve efficiency across a complex portfolio of oil field assets?

A North Sea oil joint venture directly managing dozens of oil fields, and with interests across eleven installations asked us to help them improve their efficiency. A large proportion of their fields were maturing assets. With limited lifespan remaining they were becoming expensive to run and financially unsustainable. Their barrel costs were the highest in the North Sea. They needed to enhance production and cut costs to fund future growth opportunities. How could we streamline processes across both onshore and offshore sites to make the business run better?

Our hands-on experts got to grips with challenges in the field

We assembled a Baringa team including upstream oil and gas advisors and crucially, technical offshore experts with decades of hands-on oil field experience. First, we drew up the project scope and assessed the capacity of the teams across the business. We analysed how offshore and onshore teams could deliver work more efficiently across the eleven installations. Could we create cross-installation teams to group tasks together? Across multiple offshore and onshore site visits, we interviewed 50 people to identify areas for process and operational improvement. With a clear picture of what could be improved, we began setting out implementable solutions to turn our client’s situation around. 

We took the time upfront to understand in depth the key challenges that the client was facing, and what kind of team we needed to bring to make the biggest impact. Our field industry experts gained the trust of the installation and discipline teams to ensure that process improvements would be achievable, going from on paper to in practice. We engaged with platform teams to gather feedback, develop solutions together, and ensure that any new risks that might arise could be mitigated. With a tight timeframe, we aligned the on and offshore teams and encouraged direct communication to reach solutions as quickly as possible.

Clear areas for improvement and sizeable barrel cost reductions

By the end of the project, we had identified £130 million of implementable opportunities for improvement within our client’s processes. This equated to a $4.barrel reduction in operating costs, a dramatic reduction putting them on a firmer financial footing and able to plan investments for future growth opportunities. Fortuitously, our work to identify areas to reduce costs also allowed our client to react quickly when the oil price crashed at the beginning of the pandemic. 

Find out how we help our clients in the Oil, Gas and Petrochemicals Industries