Given the rise of the national oil companies (NOC),oil reserves are increasingly harder to come by. And those available are more challengingly complex than ever before.

These are petroleum industry truisms. Yet the French oil company, Total, has to live those words every day. The result is an intense focus on technology as the means for continuing success.

With nearly 100,000 employees and operations in more than 130 countries, Total is the fourth largest publicly traded integrated oil and gas company in the world. E&P spoke with Patrick Pouyanné, senior vice president, strategy business development, engineering R&D, Total Exploration and Production, during CERA Week.

“Technology is the story of the group,” Pouyanné said. “A large part of Total’s development has been based on offshore developments in the North Sea and the Gulf of Guinea. We implemented the first subsea well in Gabon, for example. We went to Angola, and from Angola we went to Nigeria.”

Total, according to Pouyanné, is that rare thing today, a company of engineers. Without that, he said, “We will be dead.” In addition to technology, the major oil companies bring finance and project management skills. That’s the business model going forward. “The majors have been pushed by the NOCs to develop the more complex, more unconventional resources, including deep water. Innovation arises when you are forced to do it, and that’s not just in oil and gas.”

As proof, Pouyanné points to Total’s innovation in subsea environments off the coast of Africa:
• Girassol is 93 miles (150 km) offshore of Angola in approximately 4,593 ft (1,400 m) of water. The field was one of the first large deepwater projects in Africa. “Riser towers were clearly an innovative concept compared with flexible risers,” said Pouyanné.
• On Dalia, where a 71-well subsea production system includes 37 producers that feed into four production loops via nine manifolds, said Pouyanné, “We faced difficult conditions due to its heavy and viscous oil. We had to take care of flowline insulation, and flow assurance was a big challenge.”
• Then came Rosa, with a tieback of 12.5 miles (20 km), “which once again required excellent insulation characteristics of the flowlines,” he said.
• Pazflor, near the Dalia field, “was a real challenge because it involved three or four different fields within the same development, and fluids even more viscous,” Pouyanné said. “We had to implement fluid separation at the mudline.” Pazflor’s gas–liquid separation technology was the first developed for subsea.

Total operates the first subsea electronic tree. Pouyanné sees benefits in three areas. “First of all, we can increase the availability of the wells. Today we use hydraulic conversion. Electric trees increase reliability. Second, with electrical technology we will have the most appropriate system settings based on a better monitoring system. If you have better monitoring, you can optimize production. Third is that it paves the way to making subsea processing and boosting more possible. With subsea processing, you increase production. For progress in subsea processing, electrical systems are a must.”

It is all very well to believe in innovation, but without the processes in place to make innovation possible, it is just so much talk. Pouyanné, and Total, has thought long and hard about what’s necessary.

“My division is called the ‘growth’ division, which includes business development, engineering and R&D,” Pouyanné explained, “the idea being that you put together the teams that will prepare the future. If you don’t introduce innovation during the initial stage of your conceptual studies, the innovation won’t come.

“There is a rule at Total that each time we embark on a conceptual study, the engineer in charge is obliged to propose an innovative solution. So you have the standard solution and the more innovative solution. This happens at the early stage. He can take his ideas to the R&D team and discuss with them, and there are senior people that decide whether it is the right time to implement the innovative solution. If it’s approved at this stage, then it will move forward. That is the way we are organized, to drive innovation.”

Pouyanné sees the future of subsea in the not-yet-realized potential of many smaller fields further away from the coast. “We have to find a way to make it economical to develop these smaller fields,” he said. “To do that, we will need to develop long tiebacks. That means tackling problems with subsea power transmission that occur after 50 or 80 km (30 to 50 miles). You have to develop subsea processing too because flow assurance over long distances is really an issue. A final area to develop would be subsea local co-generation.”

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