Pleased with the progress - Arne S Bye, platform manager with Statoil's Kristin asset. Photo Harald Pettersen, Statoil.

The Kristin platform lies 240 km offshore from Trondheim, Norway, and is a condensate gas field with 12 wells in water depths between 240 and 320 m. Production started in November 2005.

Platform manager at Kristin, Arne Bye, talks about the transition.

“We estimate that NOK 200m (USD $36.5m) has been saved in operating costs over the first year from integrated operations,” he says. “The first year of operation is normally costly. Half of the savings were due to the way we work. The other half was due to having a better quality plant,” he says. “We have a goal of no gas leakage, and we managed it.”

We wanted to use Integrated Operations methods to be able to operate the platform with the minimum number of people onboard for safety reasons, maximise production and operational efficiency, and keep the platform in optimum technical condition. Currently there are 31 people on the platform at any one time. The minimum allowed number (for emergency preparedness) is 27 people. “So we are close to the absolute minimum,” says Bye. The platform has two management teams, one onshore and one offshore, each located in a collaboration room, and there are continuous video links from one room to another so both management teams can see each other at all times.

The operations room for managers offshore, which is continually online with the land-based operations room. Photo: Statoil

Blurring the boundaries
Traditional distinctions between work and free time are being lost, says Bye. “We had a problem with a completion – a leak – and as you can probably guess, it happened at ten to four on a Friday afternoon,” he said. “We had to gather a group of specialists to decide what to do. We worked until 6pm, started tests and agreed to meet on Saturday morning at 7am to consider the results. We discussed various options to carry out a full test. And to cap it all, at 4pm on Saturday, I was scheduled to be making dinner for friends at home.”

“So we decided that at certain steps in the test program, we would receive text messages. When we received them, we would go to our computers, and have a ten minute discussion about what to do. That would conclude the time required for the interaction. In other words, I could do the work and prepare the dinner at the same time. This is a vast improvement.”

Bye says that the platform has achieved 98 to 99 per cent regularity compared to 90 per cent uptime on other comparable North Sea platforms. The drilling was tricky, with wells at up to 87 degrees deviation (from vertical), in high pressure and high temperature reservoirs, from a floating drill rig.

“Statistically, the industry gets a well control situation from every second well drilled in high pressures and high temperatures. We had none,” he says.

Now the plan is to develop a tie-in to the platform from the neighbouring Tyrihans field, without any additional personnel. Computer tools have also proven to be very useful in managing maintenance tasks. “Normally keeping up with maintenance is quite a challenge to control,” he says.

The project team is able to do its own recruitment, and so make sure that all the people were suited to this kind of working. “They need to like to work with people,” says Bye.

"We use the term 'self-synchronisation' to refer to the way people are encouraged to work autonomously, finding their own ways to solve problems," says Bye.

Social engineers
“Many of us engineers have an unshakable conviction that we can fix everything. But it’s a good idea to bring in people from other disciplines. And we realised we needed some social engineers — anthropologists,” says Bye with a smile.

Vidar Hepsø, principal researcher and project manager with Statoil research and technology, says the company put in a lot of effort into making sure that the organisation would work.

“The social interactions between people are very important because they allow the sharing of understanding," he says. We use the term 'self-synchronisation' to refer to the way people are encouraged to work autonomously, finding their own ways to solve problems, rather than waiting for instructions.

“For self synchronisation to work, there has to be a common understanding of goals, a shared situational awareness, and a high degree of available information,” says Hepsø. “Trust is very important.”

“We need co-ordination but also have to facilitate for self synchronisation.” This led to a change in atmosphere on the platform. “You go from being instructed to more participating,” he said. “We had a successful integration of operation and maintenance teams.”

“The platform maintenance teams wanted more management support,” says Hepsø. “They wanted to use IO to improve collaboration with onshore experts.”

Many new things are now happening on the platform, he says. “The personnel have a key expertise not necessarily possessed by managers,” he says. “Now we have parallel and concurrent tasks being planned and executed by onshore and offshore teams in continuous communication, with shared situational awareness.”


This article is based on a presentation given by Arne S Bye, platform manager for Statoil's Kristin asset, and Vidar Hepso, principal researcher and project manager with Statoil Research and Technology, at the Integrated Operations conference in Trondheim, Norway. First published in the Digital Energy Journal Issue 9, 2007. Reproduced with permission.