Benefits of New Digital Solution and Workflow Applied to Fast Track Subsea Development

Abstract

An Eni initiative Fast 3Digital Subsea was made to identify opportunities for improving Company's Subsea developments in terms of time, quality and cost by applying a new way of working and implementing a new digital tool, the FieldAP/Fieldtwin platform (by FutureOn). The purpose of this paper is to present the results of the comparison made between the conventional way of working and the application of the Fast 3Digital Subsea on subsea tieback projects. Data was collected and analysed for a project using the Fast 3Digital Subsea and the results showed the following key success benefits for Eni projects: time saving, cost reduction and improvement in engineering, quality and safety. The benefits listed above were proved during the engineering phase of the project, however the Fast 3Digital Subsea is expected to lead to similar improvements for the future phases of the projects such as installation, commissioning, maintenance and operation. From a Project point of view, the digital solution is expected to lead to minimum time savings of between 1-2 months from discovery to First Oil. This 1-2 months saving are expected mainly in projects where the critical path is represented by subsea items / flowlines that could benefit from an early procurement, in particular tie-backs to existing facilities (FPSO, FPU, and Onshore Plants). For this paper, an Eni project was chosen as the base case and the impacts on project schedule, cost, quality, and discipline collaboration during the engineering, feasibility and FEED activities were evaluated. The Fast 3Digital Subsea allowed engineers to evaluate multiple scenarios more effectively, increased the quality on the project documentation, allowed to select the optimum field layout configuration at an early stage and to quickly prepare an ITT package. All of the above, showed an average time saving of approximately 30% on field layout preparation, therefore cost saving compared to the conventional way of working were realised. Another significant time saving obtained by implementing a Fast 3Digital Subsea approach was during creating of overall deliverables with time saving of nearly 60% during Pre-FEED activities. All of time savings are broken down in activities and are described in the results section. In terms of marine operation, the selected digital solution allows engineers to assess the subsea deveolopment by visualising geohazards and clashes during SIMOPS, this aspect adds singnificant value to projects for faster decision making whilst taking into consideration safety.