NEXT MEETING - FEBRUARY 25, 2010

Perdido Project - the World's deepest drilling and production facility

The Perdido Regional Host facility consists of a spar floating production platform with full drill, complete and intervention capability. Early this year Perdido reach full capacity of 130,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.

At our next luncheon, G.T. Ju, Engineering Manager with Shell, will discuss one of the most exciting and innovative projects ever undertaken in the Gulf of Mexico, - Perdido.

Perdido is an ultra-deep water development of the Great White, Silver Tip and Tobago fields in the remote southwestern Gulf of Mexico.

It is the first development to produce from the Lower Tertiary (Paleogene) geologic setting in the Gulf. Moored in 7,817 feet of water in Alaminos Canyon Block 857, the spar host is the world's deepest drilling and production facility. In 9,627 feet of water, the Tobago subsea oil well is the deepest producing well in the world

The significant challenges to delivering Perdido fell into the categories of safety, the need for new technology and low cost solutions, and overcoming overheated market conditions. With these challenges to overcome, the team committed itself early in the project to intensely focusing on safety as the highest priority. The result has been outstanding project execution safety performance across many locations, while at the same time raising the bar of how safety is incorporated into platform designs.

As to the technical and cost challenges, Perdido’s difficult reservoirs, high well count and ultra-deep water location made the development uneconomic with conventional deepwater technologies. To produce the wells, reduce the size of the host, and reduce the cost of development, an innovative system of new technologies was required, consisting primarily of wet-tree, direct vertical access (DVA) wells with a Subsea Boosting System. Sanctioning and executing the project during one of the industry's most overheated markets created numerous cost, quality, resourcing and delivery problems, requiring extraordinary effort from the project team and contractors to keep the project on track.

This presentation will provide an overview of the Perdido project, discussing the challenges that had to be surmounted and the innovations that had to be developed for successfully project delivery. The presentation will also discuss the offshore construction and commissioning activities that spanned across three calendar years, from 2008 to 2010.

About the Speaker

G. T. Ju received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1991. Since then, he has been with Shell's deepwater project execution and technology development organization. He was directly involved with technology development for deepwater applications and participated in several deepwater GOM projects, including the Auger, Mars, Ursa, and Brutus TLPs, and various subsea developments. From 2003 through early 2010, G.T. Ju led the Perdido Development Subsea Team, responsible for concept selection, technology maturation, and fabrication, installation, and commissioning of subsea and flowline systems.

G. T. Ju is currently the Engineering Manager of Subsea Hardware for Upstream Major Projects – Americas at Shell.