Chevron- Enhancing collaboration to drive future success

The focus on improving the collaborative approach had a major impact on the long term sustainability of both the Erskine and Lomond assets. The short term impact has been the delivery of a number of key milestones and significant achievements that have added real value to the business, including:

• All five Erskine wells online for the first time in two years;
• Erskine daily production rate is the highest it’s been in two years (approximately 27,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day);
• Erskine production efficiency is currently above 90% (highest since 2012); and
• Combined production from Erskine and Lomond is the highest it’s been since changing to a single train operation.

In September 2014, Chevron Upstream Europe (CUE) created a new Erskine Asset team. At the same time, BG Group were about to embark on a large scale six month floatel maintenance campaign and associated turnaround (TAR) on their Lomond facility, which remotely controls CUE’s normally unattended Erskine  installation and processes and exports the field’s hydrocarbons.

With new employees (both Chevron and BG Group) came new ideas and opportunities to improve collaboration were quickly identified. The teams started small, with regular meetings to address ways in which collective action could enhance operations.

These meetings became a foundation on which to build and the two parties quickly decided that greater collaboration was key to performance improvement and sustainability. Both groups began working together through key TAR meetings, morning calls, flow assurance work groups, engineering studies and management engagements.
An example of where this new approach has added real value to the business is the safe and successful completion of the recent large-scale maintenance campaign at Erskine.