Good reminder
Excerpts from paper by Dr. Keith K. Millheim in 2010.
"Like the micro-chip, the Self Standing Riser or SSR offers an entirely new approach for the exploration and production of many deep water fields which could make it possible for companies and governments who relied on the deep water specialty groups to exploit their deep water resources, now to do it themselves. This enabling technology, more profoundly, offers the possibility to cost effectively develop deep water resources that were considered non-commercial by conventional standards and even expedite first oil to less than one year as compared to 4 to 10 years. This technology also significantly reduces the required capital necessary to develop these resources. Then what is this SSR technology and how can it have such a major impact on deep water oil and gas resources?"
"Without a doubt the best area to test the SSR concept is West Africa. There are scores of deep water marginal fields too small to interest the major oil companies yet too expensive for conventional exploitation by smaller IOCs or NOCs."
"Now after years of development work, thorough testing and studies of the optimal conditions for the applications of this technology, we are finally ready for the commercial phase with full deployment of this new method. There is another way where smaller IOCs and NOCs in West Africa can potentially commercialize discovered non-commercial oil fields in deep water with a fraction of the CAPEX and OPEX and establish first oil and cash flow in less than a year and a half. How can this be done?"
"Consider the concept of a company that is capitalized with enough money and technical expertise to focus its activities on already found deep water oil fields that are declared non-commercial. The company would have alignment with the NOC, Government or small IOC i.e. minimize CAPEX and OPEX, and get first oil as quickly as possible, always maintaining the flexibility to expand development faster or to slow down in the event of reservoir uncertainty. Always, production and high recovery factors would be the business drivers. Today, such a company does not need a huge work force of technical experts. Service companies have operational expertise to do everything from supervising drilling, reservoir and production engineering, operating production facilities, and even logistics. This new company might have a small staff of financial personnel, some geo-scientists, and project managers and coordinators, thus keeping the overhead at a minimum. What enables this type of approach is the application of the SSR technology. One company, MEPS-FirstOil holds the exclusive license to deploy this technology, worldwide. Any drilling company, service provider, IOC, NOC can have access to the technology to exploit these marginal deep water oil fields. There is no need to rely on or wait for the major oil company to finally get to some type of future development. The SSR technology, for the first time, opens the possibility to create new ventures with creative financing for local IOCs and NOCs. The challenge is simple: if you are an IOC or NOC that has what has been called a non-commercial oil or gas field in deep water and want to have production and cash flow in 1 to 1 ½ years consider this new enabling SSR technology. Don’t let these discovered resources sit for another 10 to 20 years before someone decides for you to finally commercialize them. The history of the oil business shows where smaller operators took risks and jumped in front of the majors with new technologies."
