Case Study: Onshore Collaboration Center, Norway

After 10 years of service, Aker BP’s Onshore Operation Center (OOC) had become too limited in capacity, and an upgraded space was needed to handle more rig lines and improve collaboration. Aker BP’s ambition was to build a new world-leading Onshore Collaboration Center (OCC) in Stavanger for its Drilling & Wells operations, designed to support ever-changing workflows and the digitalization of processes. The OCC will act as a central location for Aker BP’s expertise in well placement, real-time operations, geo-steering, autonomous drilling, and the execution of the well versus the Digital Twin. It will also be the repository for rig connectivity and rig-to-shore IT support.

‘Our ambition for the OCC is to put us in the top 5% of operators worldwide for collaborative environments and remote operations. With this project we wanted to be cutting edge, to take ourselves out of our comfort zone and do things differently.’ Andy Deady, OCC Lead

Business benefits for Aker BP

The main investment vehicle was based on a BSEE report after the Macondo incident. The report found that the ROI for vendors and operators who invest in collaboration centers in oil and gas and well construction has been measured to reduce Non-productive Time (NPT) by 2.5% over a year. The tangible business benefits in adopting such a collaboration center or a real-time center is twofold: reducing invisible lost time (ILT) and increasing productivity by having everyone in the same room, using the same information, bridging the team onshore and offshore, and creating a shared situational awareness. Bringing down ILT (invisible lost time) and NPT (non-productive time) can reduce the well cost by 5%.

A new way of designing collaboration centers

The new Aker BP OCC is designed with the ethos of allowing the team to enter an environment, use it and leave if need be, but have a core team that is always located in that room, which provides greater flexibility. The environment is designed around the inputs of operators and specialists, based on their experience in the existing OOC and their needs for more collaboration and flexible design. Partners were also both part of the concept and detailed design phase, inputting how they would be interacting with the systems, and how they would be connected their applications.

A flexible solution based on standardization, infrastructure, and display technology

The Cyviz solution is based on 13 systems, all interconnected with a new generation IP-based infrastructure for routing and data distribution. The uniqueness of the solution resides in the flexibility of this new architecture, but also in the standardization principles applied to the design, and deployment of the solution. The flexibility is also reflected in the display technology favored. Seamless projection with video processing, allowing multiple dynamic PiPs (Picture-in-Picture) to be added, moved and shared across rooms. The system design also had to support the two levels of access to wells’ information, with unrestricted access and tight wells, which implies severe access restrictions.

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