Thursday 5 April 2012


Quantified Success stories 22 through 25, ConocoPhillips China


GRÜNER TAG in Projekt B-22 :)Façade du Hangar 2324Sábado 25, dia de COLOMBAR - IçaraThere are a whole series of Knowledge Management success stories in the Summer 2005 edition of the ConocoPhillips China Newsletter

Here are a few success stories, each of which has a dollar value figure assigned.
Tom Lan, Senior Operations Support Engineer, Production Support of ConocoPhillips China (COPC), cites a good example of knowledge sharing (KS) that took place early January 2005. Tom needed a simulation model to calculate the pressure drop on the subsea pipeline at Bohai Phase 1 and organized a site visit by Larry Harms, Staff Production Optimization Engineer at the US Lower 48 & Latin America business unit. By sharing software, Larry and Tom were able to create a simulation model at a net saving US$19,600 for the company.

In another story, Jerry Liu, Senior Buyer of Tanggu Operations, COPC, was preparing to order 7 5/8" 13 Cr casing for an upcoming drilling program. The quoted prices for this material seemed excessive, so contacts were made with Global Procurement who suggested checking with Australia for market intelligence. Changes to the Australian program had resulted in some of their material being surplus and available at a much lower price. 4,431 meters of pipe were then transferred from Australia to China. The China BU saved approximately US$526,000. An additional benefit may be claimed by the Australian BU as they were able to dispose of excess material.

Brendan O'Reilly, Senior Explorationist, Exploration Department, COPC, gave an example of how knowledge was shared from various BU's overseas to the China BU, saving the company US$10 million in drilling costs. The China BU Exploration Team called upon this expertise from Vietnam, Indonesia and two groups in Houston to peer review the geoscience and engineering aspects of the PL 9-1 Buried Hill Field that was discovered in 2000. The peer team reviewed the results of the discovery well, the geological, geophysical interpretation, the resulting geological model and the different play types and recommended that the China BU focus on a southern Carbonate Play that may provide the best opportunity to achieve economic success on the project. The peer team also recommended that an expensive deeper well (costing US$10 million) not be proposed until more well information is acquired.

Carl Cheng, Production Engineer, Production Engineering Department of COPC, gave an excellent example of applied KS centered around a developing technology. The China BU was recommended by UT to field-trial the Multi-Phase Meter (MPM) as an alternative well testing method (as compared to the conventional test separator method). During the six month testing phase in Bohai field, a number of comparison tests were conducted between the two with the guidelines established by a Flow & Metering expert at UT. Based on UT's recommendation, COPC purchased this unit of locally-made MPM last year and switched fully to MPM for all daily well testing in Bohai field as of November 2004. Experience from PL 19-3 Phase I operation shows that the MPM results were overall more consistent than the test Separator results. This has made production allocation more accurate as well performance is evaluated. Moreover, MPM has cut the well testing time by half from 4 hours to 2 hours with improved metering accuracy. It is projected that from November 2004 to the end of 2005, the revenue from the resulted incremental production could reach approximately US$147,000.


2 comments:

Stephen Duffield said...

Hi Nick, I would be interested in your views on what role KM may have played or should have played with the recent 2011 oil spill incident in the Bohai Sea? some say they are not learning the lessons of previous pipeline explosions? http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/jul/07/china-oil-spill-cover-up-bohai-sea

Nick Milton said...

Hi Stephen

I don't know enough about the incident to make any useful comment I am afraid (otherwise than noting that I dont think it was a pipeline explosion)

I think we will need to wait for the incident report to be published, and to look at the root causes, before we can comment on lessons being learned or not.

Blog Archive