Frans G. Van Den Berg

Business Value From Intelligent Fields

The Smart Fields programme has been active in Shell over the last decade and has given large benefits. In order to understand the value and to underpin strategies for the future implementation programme, a study was carried out to quantify the benefits to date. This focused on actually achieved value, through increased production or lower costs. This provided an estimate of the total value achieved to date. Future benefits such as increased reserves or continued production gain were recorded separately. The paper describes the process followed in the benefits quantification. It identifies the key solutions and technologies and describes the mechanism used to understand the relation between solutions and value. Examples have been given of value from various assets around the world, in both existing fields and in green fields. Finally, the study provided the methodology for tracking of value. This helps Shell to estimate and track the benefits of the Smart Fields programme at company scale.

Collaborative Working - Harvesting Value and Evolving with New Technologies

Collaborative Work Environments (CWEs) were implemented in the majority of Shell’s assets, now covering over 55% of the production. Collaborative working has evolved beyond production and surveillance processes, includes new mobility and visualization technologies and supports the cost reduction drive. The paper provides: • Business Value and Lessons Learnt from global CWE deployment; • Examples from three assets in different countries and environments; • Evolution of the collaboration model; • Use of new technologies in mobility, visualisation and exception based surveillance. Collaborative Work Environments Under the heading of Smart Fields, Shell has pursued intelligent energy in its oil and gas fields for the last ten years (Van den Berg 2010, De Best 2012). The value of collaborative working was understood early on, both in Shell (Knoppe 2008) and in industry (e.g. Gilman 2012). By 2015, Shell had CWEs operational in more than 40 of its largest assets (Van den Berg 2014, 2015), as shown in Figure 1. More than 55% of Shell’s production is now managed through CWEs. These CWEs target a single asset and provide effective collaboration between the office asset teams and the field operations staff. The key processes in these CWEs are production surveillance and management and maintenance processes including equipment and reliability monitoring. The asset team in the office and the operations teams in the field have high quality video connections and visually share data and information in real time for analysis and fast decision making. The CWEs enable the field and office staff to connect to experts, service companies, suppliers and other key stakeholders without the need for the experts to travel to the field or into the country. A structured work week guides the asset team and the operational staff with standard processes and regular meetings, for example daily production meetings. All final manuscripts will be sent through an XML mark-up process that will alter the LAYOUT. This will NOT alter the content in any way.