AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

The realisation or delivery of a business opportunity in Shell is all about delivering value to the Company and its shareholders. The early identification and understanding of value drivers - i.e. how value will be generated by an opportunity - is of critical importance. Shell has adopted a structured process to progress a hydrocarbon (development) business opportunity through a number of steps each with a check point from Identify through Assess, Select, Define, Execute to Operate. At each of the check points or “stage gates” care is taken to confirm that the value drivers remain respected. Typical of such value drivers are Cost, Production, Schedule, Applica-tion of Standard Solutions, Ability to Replicate / Repeat, Operational Reliability, Reputation and HSSE. In upstream projects, the objective of the Assess phase is to identify a number of feasible con-cepts to take into the next phase. The intent here is to think ‘wide’, keeping in mind whatever value drivers have been deemed important but by the end of the phase to have already narrowed it down to a more limited number of feasible options. To facilitate and simplify offshore development concept selection bearing in mind the value driver parameters of cost, schedule, standardization and replications, Shell Global Solutions has commissioned an improvement of the current selection procedure. Historically, whenever a new project or business opportunity screening has been initiated, the tendency has been to kick off the “engineering” of a number of possible solutions. However, there is a growing global data set of Shell and other industry solutions for analogous prospects or field developments which could be drawn upon as the solution. Unfortunately, the data is not structured or organized in such a way that concept engineers could screen options with the degree of confidence required to support quality decisions at the Assess stage gate. To address this issue, the decision was taken to create an Offshore Concept Selection Guideline. The purpose of the Guideline is two-fold. Firstly it gives a complete overview of all the possible concepts applicable to offshore hydrocarbon developments covering the spectrum from shallow to very deep water. Secondly it contains a procedure to assist all those tasked with concept de-velopment & selection to rapidly and confidently screen possible concepts and land on the one or two most suited to the conditions applicable to the offshore region under consideration. Fi-nally a validation method is used, to prove that the concepts that have currently been placed across the world are the right options for consideration if a project would occur in that location again. One development concept still at an early stage in terms of maturity is that of the "Subsea Stor-age Unit". If this concept is proved and accepted, it could have a significant impact on options for the storage of produced hydrocarbons either during extended well testing or as part of the preferred field development. In addition, it could allow for the storage of…