My sister and brother-in-law, Dan, were visiting us the other day. Dan has a successful medical practice in Odessa, Texas, in the middle of the Permian Basin oil fields. He, like the rest of the family, is no stranger to the oil and gas industry - or part of it, at least. At some point in an early-evening conversation, Dan noted that on a recent Northern European cruise, the family had crossed the North Sea at night. All were amazed that the night was sprinkled with lights from platforms and drilling rigs. It made, he allowed, the dull, wearisome sea seem almost friendly. He thought, he said, that the platforms lit up at night looked like small cities.
They are, Dan. But it is what you did not see that would really impress you.
That was my warm, fuzzy thought about Dan's observation. The more I thought about it though, the more my mind turned to another thought. The offshore industry is mature, more than 50 years old. And it has changed dramatically. Where we once developed single fields, we now develop infrastructure.
That thought was bolstered by recent conversations with Shell's deepwater group about the continuing development of the Auger field in the Gulf of Mexico. Shell has a series of fields sprinkled in deep water past the edge of the shelf - Auger, Mars, Ursa and soon Brutus. The facilities initially were developed to support single-field development. But their value lies as much in their use as deepwater hubs as it does in single-field development. Tie-ins of the Macaroni, Oregano and Serrano subsea fields to Auger have proven the point. The Habanero field will be tied in soon, followed, perhaps, by non-Shell tie-ins.
When I was working with PGS on floating production, storage and offloading projects, we developed the same approach, planning facilities for extended use through hub-based tie-ins. Petrobras does it offshore Brazil. Hibernia, off Newfoundland, will rapidly become a hub. It seems intuitive. But for those of us developing offshore fields in the 1970s, it is a paradigm shift - hate that phrase, but it seems to suit in this case. I do not recall planning one Gulf of Mexico platform as a hub. But that was in the 1970s, before subsea technology was widely proven. And there is where the paradigm shift - still hate the phrase - lies.
Subsea technology has not only changed the way we develop offshore fields, it has changed the nature of the industry. In the North Sea in the mid- to late 1970s, we developed massive surface infrastructure to support extended field development. It is hard to imagine the Brent field in the UK sector being built today as it was then, with four huge platforms - Alpha, Brava, Charlie and Delta. BP's new Crazy Horse development, variously estimated with all tie-in components at no less than 1 billion bbl and perhaps as many as 3 billion bbl, will be developed with one, or perhaps two, semisubmersible production units. And you can bet that the unit or units will be designed with additional tie-ins in mind. Crazy Horse, like Auger, is a hub development. Its value lies as much in future development possibilities as in development of the Crazy Horse fields.
The Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, Southeast Asia and Australasia all are littered with single-use platforms. The industry must spend billions to remove these structures, many with useful lives left, in an environmentally sound manner. The new-generation hub developments will have a longer, more productive life.
When we installed some of the monsters - Ekofisk, Brent, Ninian - we might have done it differently, but not much differently. We did not have the technology, and the consequent mind-set, to do them much differently. Now we do, and we are. It is another of those cases where technology drives innovation rather than innovation driving technology. We were a mature single-field development industry in the 1970s. We are a rapidly becoming a hub development industry. It might seem intuitive, but it was not always.

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