The Mad Dog 2 Field, tied back to the Argos platform, is approximately 190 miles south of New Orleans. The field is an extension of the original Mad Dog Field—bp’s biggest discovery in the Gulf of Mexico to date. For the next phase of field development, bp sought to adopt an innovative approach to subsea production that would optimize end-to-end operations for a more competitive and predictable project outcome.
OneSubsea collaborated closely with bp to understand the full scope of work and unearth opportunities to improve efficiency and productivity. The proposed portfolio of products was optimized utilizing a supplier-led approach—Agile SPS.
Agile SPS enhances subsea performance from appraisal through abandonment to unlock the full economic potential of the field. This agility considers the total asset journey from day one to maximize the value of an asset over time and provide a new level of customer collaboration.
The suite of field-proven standardized products included
Throughout tendering, OneSubsea worked alongside bp to recommend a more robust, simplified field architecture instead of overspecified, bespoke equipment. In the revised tender, bp scrubbed specifications of all requirements that had previously driven specialized engineering across product lines; instead, bp focused only on core baseline requirements. As a result of this introspection, bp signed up for one of the world’s first systems-level supplier-led-solution projects.
By accepting OneSubsea standard SPS designs, reviews formalized quickly, which expedited tree engineering and delivery. The use of optimized infrastructure and standard supplier-led products enabled bp to save 50%–60% in SPS hardware costs.
The trees arrived from Johor, Malaysia, ahead of schedule. As well plans became better defined, some changes to the trees were unavoidable; adding downhole flow control to each production tree and rearranging the downhole line configurations were undertaken in the Berwick, Louisiana, facility. Although this task may have overrun project timelines in the past, delivering ahead of schedule meant that engineering, procurement, and testing could all take place without affecting the planned tree delivery dates.
The early delivery of the production trees enabled batch-set installation, which led to additional savings in terms of costs, timeline, and carbon emissions. In all, the adaptability, configurability, and flexibility of the Agile SPS helped bp save considerable costs and maximize return on investment while decreasing its environmental footprint. To date, nine production trees and four water injection trees have been successfully installed and completed with no tree-related nonproductive time. The final manifold was installed in January 2021.
bp also adopted the OneSubsea program approach to accelerate production targets in Egypt. By reconfiguring the production flow path module, bp was able to convert a water-injector tree into a gas-production tree and then quickly reallocate the subsea trees from the Gulf of Mexico to Egypt. Leveraging the common core functional modules, the subsea tree required minimal changes to accommodate this conversion.
—Richard Morrison, Regional President of GOM and Canada, bp
For its Mad Dog 2 subsea production project, bp sought a more efficient approach to engineer and deploy the required hardware. bp and OneSubsea collaborated on the supplier-led Agile subsea production system (SPS) approach that would enable flexible installation, standardized designs, and operational agility. As a result, bp accelerated its timeline by batch-setting the infrastructure and saved 50%–60% in SPS hardware costs.