The Perdido Regional Host is in the ultra-deepwater Gulf of Mexico, and produces from two Lower Tertiary horizons in multiple drill centers; some directly under the host SPAR, and others offset up to 7 miles and in water depths between 7800 and 9600 ft. All of the production is from relatively low-energy reservoirs, and posed considerable productivity challenges. The approaches to managing flow assurance risk and maximizing recoverable volumes were driven by the economically challenged environment in which the system was conceived and designed, and resulted in a unique host configuration relying on subsea wells and five high-powered ESP artificial lift systems with slug catching and two-phase separation accomplished on the seafloor. The final commissioning and early production characteristics of the system as related to the design intent and operational expectations will be described.The commissioning and early production phases of the development provided opportunities to validate Perdido subsea hydraulic models and operational methods that were considerably different from the typical approach employed by major oil companies in deepwater. Novel monitoring and surveillance tools generated by the project were benchmarked using early production data, and learnings were recycled into improvements to these models. This project is a considerable extension to previous systems, and due to the cost constraints of the risked recoverable volumes and high cost of operating in the ultra deep environment, it was imperative to advance the state of the art of flow assurance and operability.
The maximum level of process safety performance an operational asset can attain is indelibly set in the early stages of a project; this is why it is crucial to lay a solid foundation for process safety during design. Despite ever improving design codes and standards, the hydrocarbon industry continues to suffer from major process safety incidents, with incident root causes far too commonly traced back to decisions or actions taken years before during the design stage of a project. Construction safety standards and practices are also long-standing and maturing, but it was the adoption of behaviour-based site-safety campaigns that have allowed selected projects to realise a step-change in incident reduction beyond that offered by systems and practice; achieving world-breaking records of personnel safety. Before embarking on Front-End Engineering Design (FEED), the world-scale Al Karaana Petrochemicals Projecti asked, ‘is it possible to translate the concept of a behavioural-based site-safety programme into a process safety design context?’ To answer this question, a Behaviour-Based Process Safety Programme was created and then piloted with the aim to entrench process safety into the hearts and minds of design engineers, and positively influence behaviours. The cornerstone of this programme is the 9 Foundations of Projects Process Safety, which serve as clear anchor points around which the key messages on process safety are communicated during the Project's FEED. The 9 Foundations of Projects Process Safety are not intended to create any new ‘rules’, but are aimed to help focus on changing behaviours in critical areas where weaknesses are observed in projects. This paper offers observations on framing, developing and then embedding the Behaviour-Based Process Safety Programme for a design-office audience. It records the learning on success as well as improvement opportunities and outlines the intended path forward for subsequent project phases.
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