BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 3 - (Page 54)

PLANT BE Award Winner PROJECT OVERVIEW Data Deja Vu Reusing the right drill-site design data reduces oil ﬁeld engineering costs by $2 million ConocoPhillips Drill Site Technologies Organization VECO Alaska Inc. BE Awards Category Plant Innovation Project Objective Reuse past project data to design two new drill sites located north of the Arctic Circle on Alaska’s North Slope L ocated in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle, Alaska’s North Slope oil ﬁelds produce 16 percent of the U.S. domestic oil supply and 90 percent of the state’s revenues. The No. 1 oil and gas producer in the state, ConocoPhillips Alaska Inc. (CPAI), invested about $1.6 billion in exploration, development, operations, and maintenance last year, including $750 million in capital projects. To overcome the challenges of remote location, extreme climate, and complex regulatory environment on the North Slope, CPAI partners with specialist Alaskan oil-ﬁeld service contractors such as VECO Alaska Inc. VECO became globally known in 1989 as prime contractor in the Exxon Valdez oil spill clean-up. Today, the contractor has more than 4,000 employees supporting the energy, resource, and process industries throughout the world, and generates annual revenues of $1 billion. More than half of the VECO workforce is in Alaska, where engineers apply innovative technology to support CPAI’s oil and gas production. From 2004 to 2005, VECO designed drilling sites for two new Alpine satellite oil ﬁelds—the Fiord oil ﬁeld (CD3) to the north and the Nanuq oil ﬁeld (CD4) to the south—which CPAI developed at a cost of more than $675 million. In 2005, CPAI challenged VECO to help reduce costs by reusing CD4 data for a new CD5 drill site at Alpine. Reusing drill-site design and engineering data was conceptually possible, but it had not been done before within the CPAI managed environment. VECO’s Design Technology Group (DTG), led by Mark Christianson, design technologies manager, worked out a process that not only saved time and money, but also preserved project knowledge about how to resolve drill-site design issues. In mid-2006, when CPAI discovered Qannik, a satellite development overlying the Alpine oil ﬁeld, VECO again reused design data, making CD5 the design basis for Qannik. Using a combination of AutoPLANT and ProjectWise (in compliance with CPAI’s managed environment), VECO manages and stores all 2D and 3D drawings, supporting designs, and project management documents in a central location with secure access. Document attributes entered via ProjectWise automatically propagate to the title blocks in AutoPLANT documents, eliminating duplicate data entry and maintaining consistency between design and engineering. As documents progress through design, they are routed for review, attributes updated, and editing rights eventually restricted to select users. Individual components progress at their own pace, so projected completion dates are accurate and reliable. “VECO uses ProjectWise and the entire AutoPLANT suite to produce cutting-edge designs,” said VECO project manager Steve Preston. “Repeating these designs and reusing the data three and four times produces an estimated 20 to 30 percent cost reduction compared to ‘from-scratch’ projects.” VECO’s client, CPAI, monitors design progress by accessing project data through the ProjectWise Web portal. At speciﬁed milestones, VECO transmits deliverables to the client from the distribution server. “ProjectWise enables us to maintain positive control of documents without imposing undue restrictions on their accessibility,” Preston added. Replicating intelligent data v VECO reused intelligent CD4 drill-site data to create the CD5 drill-site design within a managed environment Reusing drill-site data, however, is not a simple process of copying documents to a new project directory. VECO combines several Bentley technologies to produce “intelligent data” that can be reused without losing linked information. For example, reusing the data requires successful linking of component tags 54 BE MAGAZINE | Volume 4, Issue 3

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 3

Contents Rising to the Challenge News BE Newsletter Highlights More ITS Sightings Racing Concrete Canoes Lights, Camera, Action! Making the Cut People’s Choice Awards 2007 Executive Keynotes Building Clear Vision of a Dream Concrete Results Reaching New Heights Building News From Bentley Golden KIWI Awards 2007 Civil A Coordination of National Highway Proportions Training Troops Beautifying Highways, One Sign at a Time Civil News From Bentley Geospatial Facility Facelift Planning for Uncertainty Geospatial News From Bentley MicroStation at the Heart of LiDAR Surveying Solutions Plant Making the Grade Data Deja Vu Data Clouds Provide Clear Visual of Underground Saving Precious-Metal Mining Time Plant News From Bentley Advertisers Index Special/Academic The Art of Visualization Training Is Key To Delivering State-of-the-Art Solutions Bridging the Information/Infrastructure Gap

BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 3

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