Page 44: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Nov/Dec 2019)

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FEATURE Production

OPTIMIZING RECOVERY

BP’s Mad Dog ? eld in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico is a good news story that keeps delivering, and the reservoir management team aims to keep it that way.

BY JENNIFER PALLANICH hen discovered in 1998, the ? eld in Green

Canyon blocks 825, 826 and 782 was thought to hold 1 billion barrels of oil in place. Production began in 2005 from the

W original Mad Dog truss spar. Known as the A-Spar, it was equipped for simultaneous production and drilling opera- tions. Later appraisal and delineation programs combined with improved seismic data shot the resources estimate up to 5 billion barrels of oil in place. BP and partners BHP and Chevron planned a second ? oating platform, initially dubbed Big Dog, to serve the ? eld. In 2013, they scrapped the $22 billion project as uneconomic and in 2016 sanc- tioned a $9 billion plan known as Mad Dog 2.

When Mad Dog 2 goes online in late 2021, it will rely on a host of reservoir management strategies to squeeze out as much oil as possible from the reservoir. BP has used billion barrels of oil in place, so far 250 million barrels have techniques like LoSal EOR Technology, immobile prop- been produced. Most of that, Emembolu says, has come from pant, downhole ? ow control and ocean bottom node the northwest and northeast portions of the reservoir. The monitoring at other ? elds, but this is the ? rst time all the 10th producing well began production in 2019 and pushed strategies have been planned into a project from the outset. the spar past its previous capacity of 80,000 b/d. A recent “There’s a huge amount of oil here. We have to do more debottlenecking effort provided additional capacity closer to to optimize it,” says Colin Bruce, manager of the glob- 100,000 b/d, and BP is taking advantage of that, he says.

al modeling team in BP’s upstream technology division. “We may get 350 million barrels out of the existing “We’re standing on all the embedded knowledge that BP spar,” which was designed to produce a ? eld holding 1 bil- has and applying it all to Mad Dog 2.” lion barrels of oil in place, Emembolu says. “That’s not a

Emeka Emembolu, vice president reservoir development material proportion of the currently understood resources. for the Gulf of Mexico, says Mad Dog is one of the largest That is part of the driver for the Mad Dog 2 facility.” undeveloped Miocene ? elds in the Gulf of Mexico. Of the 5 He says that in some ways the A-Spar has functioned 44 OFFSHORE ENGINEER OEDIGITAL.COM