A $10bn revenue opportunity

Improvements in surveillance, through the introduction of seafloor data-acquisition systems, flow boosting and flow assurance in a real-time environment could lead to significant improvements in subsea well productivity, writes Zaki Selim, president, well completions and productivity, Schlumberger

FIELD PRODUCTIVITY and process optimisation remain fundamental to the economic success of oilfields and the acquisition and application of real-time data, made possible by the highly sophisticated hardware available, can improve productivity significantly. According to one major operator, decision-making capacity in subsea wells is constrained by a lack of data—the data stream from its subsea wells amounts only to about 5% of the data that would be available to it from existing platform wells. The first subsea Christmas tree was installed in 1961. In the following 37 years, the industry installed 1,000 subsea wells. By 2009, well over 1,000 will be commissioned—with capital expenditures risi