An Era to Remember: Managing Offshore Drilling Campaign During World Pandemic Covid-19 Crisis

When the pandemic COVID-19 erupted and spreaded throughout the world, numerous rules and regulations were implemented to ensure the safety of everyone. The outcome of Covid-19 resulted in a global shutdown, where cases continued to grow rapidly that directly affected the normal processes in all business sectors. While the future is still uncertain, business plan must keep on progressing by managing all the obstacles to ensure the business goal is delivered efficaciously while keeping the impact as low as possible. In the early stage of the outbreak, there was limited knowledge and experience to manage a drilling campaign virtually, to ensure all plans are smooth despite all the restrictions to avoid additional cost and schedule impact to the company. Since the outbreak was quite abrupt, the main challenge faced by the team was to ensure a continuous operation like any other year before but with additional enforcement of stringent COVID-19 SOP and to come up with new modus operandi with stringent SOP at every location. During this pandemic, the operation is exposed to the risk of being on standby mode due to equipment unavailability, unreadiness of manpower or delay in vessel movement. Knowing that drilling operation is so dynamic, that a slight change to the drilling sequence could lead to operation shutdown if the required services are not readily onboard. This uncomplimentary impact is due to the new rules or regulations implemented on the manpower and equipment movement to reduce risk of Covid-19 infection. Therefore, a thorough planning is crucial to ensure the success of operation, in fact a few fallback plans must be in placed to minimize the cost and schedule exposure. This paper will address the challenges in managing equipment and manpower throughout the operation for BX-Project together with the solutions to ensure the governance, rules and regulations of Covid-19 are being followed. The approaches taken during this campaign is used as a baseline to run a drilling operation during Covid-19 pandemic in the upcoming year. Lessons learnt captured from this campaign can be replicated by other projects and finding the more efficient ways to implement the best practices. This pandemic has challenged our perseverance to deliver the project objectives while maintaining the dedication, health, focus as well as creativity to overcome unfamiliar circumstances.