Abstract
LEAN concepts have been applied in a wide range of industrial areas to identify and eliminate the waste in every stage of different processes, currently improve efficiency and lower production costs has become popular among Oil and Gas senior-level management. Minimizing waste is the base on which LEAN concepts are built. A LEAN endeavor seeks to eliminate activities or processes that consume resources, add cost or require unproductive time without creating value. The concepts can be described as striving for excellence in operations in which each employee seeks to eliminate waste and participates in the smooth flow of value to the customer. As part of a complete new strategy to ensure permanent improvements within the whole operational environment Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) has applied LEAN on drilling and other corporate core areas. This paper presents a LEAN application to optimize the Snubbing Interventions in order to ensure a significant CAPEX and OPEX reduction in an extensive deliquification campaign for gas wells thru the implementation of high end Velocity String (VS) completions.
The projects involve the application of LEAN methodology from the early planning stages using in many cases re-engineering to the functional specifications, material selection and operational procedures. This re-engineering includes a deep review of every intervention activity, the application of new technologies and the analysis of major issues during previous snubbing interventions, followed by the measurement of the real operational times and deep technical brainstorming on every stage of the intervention process. All those factors have contributed with a significant amount of improvements along the intervention campaign.
