Industry body Oil & Gas UK have announced a new taskforce to make the North Sea more competitive.
The UK offshore industry has been severely impacted by the crash in the oil price with many operators already having announced major job cuts and revised their investment plans.
The new Efficiency Task Force (ETF)will be led by John Pearson, the organisation’s newly appointed co-chairman and AMEC Foster Wheeler’s group president for North Europe and CIS.
The challenge for ETF will be to drive improvement, make the sector more competitive, and support the drive to maximise economic recovery from the UK continental shelf.
Oil & Gas UK said it was taking the lead to help drive pan-industry initiatives and secure the transformational change that was required to make the North Sea more competitive.
“Tackling efficiency has been at the forefront of industry minds for some time but has become more acute and urgent as the value of our end product has more than halved in the last year,” Mr Pearson said.
“We now need to step up, increase the effort and resource we’re putting in, and get the job done as a united industry.
“We’re taking a three-pronged approach under the themes: business process; standardisation; and cooperation, culture and behaviours, and are focusing on two or three projects in each. What’s essential here is that we don’t try to boil the ocean.
“We’ve put a lot of thought into where we can have most impact and will be working with the industry to see these projects through.
“Only if industry works together can we achieve the major transformation in efficiency we need to see.”
ETF hopes to persuade companies to work more openly, explore opportunities for the pooling and sharing of items of high-value kit and create visibility of stock holdings across the industry.
The ETF holds a dataset of 10 operators’ stock listings, containing in excess of 165,000 items, and is working with them to rationalise their inventory to reduce costs related to the storage and maintenance of materials.
The taskforce is also aiming to tackle the efficiency of compression systems which account for production losses of 20 million barrels per year.
“Oil and gas currently account for 70 per cent of the UK’s primary energy demand a figure which will remain unchanged until at least 2030, according to the Department for Energy,” O&G UK CEO Deirdre Michie said.
“A large proportion of that demand could still be met by oil and gas produced from our resources in the UK. This is an estimated 20 billion barrels of oil and gas still to find on the UK Continental Shelf, but the industry is undoubtedly facing an uphill struggle to maximise recovery. Becoming more efficient is the most critical challenge we face today.”