Gavin Ward is presenting at the SPE Annual Conference ‘Oil and Gas Industry in a new Epoch’ in London next month

RISC UK General Manager Gavin Ward will be presenting at the SPE Annual Conference ‘Oil and Gas Industry in a new Epoch’ in London next month, being held at the St Paul’s Conference Centre on Tuesday 27th June. Gavin joins an impressive line up of speakers at this years’ conference to speak in the technical session:

The End Game/Mature Provinces (North Sea, West Africa)

Operators are confronted with decisions of whether to sell mature assets, invest in the modernisation of the asset, or incur the cost of decommissioning. Mature assets have become strategic acquisitions for low cost operating companies with the support of the financial sector that has also moved focus from exploration-appraisal stage and pre-development acquisitions financing to mature assets acquisitions where production exists and value can be quickly monetised through lower cost production. Mature assets have a long production history with operating infrastructure potentially close to its design life. For mature assets, the main risk for economic viability is often related to the aging of the facilities impacting availability and downtime, in addition to well integrity issues such as sand production, erosion, flow assurance, corrosion and lack of production optimisation technologies.

Multibillion dollar transactions in the UK mature asset arena during 2016, demonstrate continued interest and economic viability of these assets. On the other hand, West Africa offshore developments have witnessed slowdowns with the lack of financing compounded by lower commodity prices and risk perception. As operations of the mature assets transition to smaller producers, the focus appears to be on optimising field output and opportunities to defer multimillion dollar decommissioning costs. This session focusses on both the opportunities and real world concerns related to mature assets with strategic focus on North Sea and West Africa.

The Technical Session will run from 1:30-3pm. To view the full conference schedule, please visit the SPE website.