Better timing and delivery of products saves money for offshore operators.

As few as 5 years ago, Gulf of Mexico delivery services to offshore operations were strictly low-technology, but tailored, integrated operations have created a smooth-running, high-efficiency flow of products.
Picture a typical offshore logistics operation half a decade ago. A drilling rig might have two boats dedicated to its service. Those boats would make sure the rig got the mud and hardware it needed to do its job effectively. But much of the time, at least one of those boats would lie on call but idle, and chances are both boats would carry only a partial load of cargo to cater to the needs of that particular rig.
When a boat arrived at a shore base such as Port Fourchon in Louisiana, it would take its place in line. It might stand in one line to offload hardware for repair, one line to take on fuel, another line for goods to feed the crew, another line to load mud supplies another line to wait for crane-loading service and still other lines for other goods.
Small numbers of small boats designed for fast trips and near-shore operations grew to fleets of small boats making long trips to serve the deepwater market.
Operators paid for service the way they paid for postage stamps. Neither the trip distance nor the cargo load percentage mattered. That customer paid the boat's full day rate, not for the part of the boat it used. That picture has changed.
"Five years ago, a cargo supply vessel would take 3 days to acquire a load we can put on a vessel now in 8 hours," said Mike Cook, general manager for C-Logistics in Galliano, La., a division of Edison Chouest Offshore.
This was no overnight transformation, and faster loading is only one of the almost revolutionary changes that have taken place in offshore logistics.
Edison Chouest Offshore saw the need for bigger, better boats to serve the deepwater market and built a new-generation deepwater supply vessel in 1992, primarily to serve Shell's Auger tension-leg platform, said Roger White, vice president of business development at Edison Chouest Offshore. It met with suppliers and operators to determine the needs, and it put the Amy Chouest into service in 1993.
Since then, that class of boats has grown and become more sophisticated. A new, proprietary hull design added speed and reduced fuel use. An anti-roll system reduced roll 50% and the acceleration of roll by 70%. A higher freeboard kept water off the supplies, and an automatic station-keeping system resulted in a class of boats that reduced the risk of damage to an offshore installation.
The new class of vessels is 200% larger, with correspondingly larger deck surface for cargo and storage capacity for fluids. New vessels haul 10 Mcf of bulk goods and 6,000 bbl of mud and can load out the deck with 1,500 long tons of cargo. For the operator, that means fewer trips.
But that wasn't enough. "The oil companies told us the loading time - the lines for different facilities - wasted time," White said.
Edison Chouest Offshore first built C-Port and recently built the first phase of C-Port II at Port Fourchon. C-Port has nine boat slips, and C-Port II has three slips and could grow to nine.
With those state-of-the-art ports, trucks bring cargo to the boats, and overhead gantry cranes load at the dock. Facilities at the slips offload cargo and liquids, clean tanks, fuel the vessels and load whatever goods are needed in hours, not days.
A host of services has grown up around the C-Ports. For example, the Smith Services arm of Smith International built a tubulars inspection and repair facility at C-Port II, where it can inspect, clean and repair 18,000 ft (5,490 m) of drill pipe in 72 hours. A related Drilco center handles hardbanding and can save up to 10 hours of rig time by servicing drill pipe quickly. Smith rental tools wait in warehouses dockside.
At C-Port II, M-I LLC not only stocks drilling fluids, but it has a dockside environmental center that cleans up the fluids for recycling and redistribution to rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
But that still wasn't good enough. In most cases, individual companies still "bought the boat" for specific jobs. Sharing was a natural solution.
For Shell, the sharing concept gained a lot of impetus when oil prices plunged in 1998. At that time Paul Sullivan, Shell Exploration and Production Co.'s general manager for exploration and production on the Gulf of Mexico shelf, tried with other operators and service companies to form a cooperative for shared services. That didn't work, but they did work out sharing arrangements in specific resources and regions. That worked well. In every case, it increased capacity utilization at least 10%.
Shell's Bob Sheffield, logistic and GulfShare leader, got involved as the system added refinement. Shell had been optimizing its internal systems, and that helped identify ways to share external services. In addition, Shell Expro already had a system in the North Sea that provided a work process for planning numbers and types of boats, coordinating supply deliveries, planning loads and scheduling boats.
Shell hired Cambridge Management Consultants to help set up a more efficient system for the Gulf of Mexico, and they tried it out on the Mars and Ursa platforms and the Noble Jim Thompson semisubmersible drilling rig.
They called the new system Technical Limit Logistics because it was designed to let people and processes work at their technical limits with maximum cooperation and a minimum number of bottlenecks, said Sheffield. From that highly successful pilot program, Sheffield's group began training people in the rest of the Gulf of Mexico to use the scheduled delivery and shared services technique.
Meanwhile, Edison Chouest had designed a new logistics integration and coordination system called C-Logistics, an affiliate of Edison Chouest. It handles logistics work for Shell, but it is an independent organization that can serve other customers equally.
After a start in April 2000, the system spread Gulfwide for Edison Chouest and Shell in September. Shell will save 20% of its logistics costs under the new system, Sheffield said. For Shell, that's no small number. The company works 24 to 27 boats full time, even under the new, more efficient program.
With Technical Limit Logistics, managers on a platform can call, fax or e-mail C-Logistics with an order for supplies to be delivered at a certain time. C-Logistics will order it from the manufacturer, have it delivered to the right C-Port slip and make sure it reaches the rig by the time the Shell manager needs it.
Multiply that by a dozen or more installations on a particular delivery corridor with dozens of orders from each installation and a process evolves. The service company has enough advance information to design maximum boatloads and draw up plans to balance those loads and deliver the needed goods with the fewest number of optimally loaded boats.
"That puts part of the burden of managing logistics in the hands of logistics experts," Sheffield said. Now, the company has one fleet that reduced vessel-to-rig rates, took logistics management out of the workload of rig operators and increased the number of vessel visits to platforms from three a week to five a week.
More important, Sheffield said, this system is good for everyone. The operator saves money. Suppliers can get better asset utilization during periods of low prices or in times of tight equipment availability. Even the Edison Chouest boats that Shell no longer needs have been deployed to other operations at attractive rates.
Edison Chouest is exploring plans for a C-Port at Galveston, Texas, and for similar facilities in Brazil and West Africa.
But even those delivery advances aren't good enough. To make good on delivery times, boats still sometimes had to leave port partially loaded. Shell wanted a way to share services to use them to their full capacity.
"If I can share deck space with 40% for company A and 60% for company B, we both gain," Sheffield said. Not only that, but the host company can charge the guest company a premium for space used, and both still will gain.
Sharing is going even further with the GulfShare program, he added. GulfShare, at www.gulfshare.com, has about 40 members among offshore operators, consultants and service and supply companies. Sheffield was one of the organizers.
It's informal and voluntary, and it's specifically designed to allow companies to share offshore activities. The site opens a myriad of possibilities, but Sheffield offered some examples.
A company might have a run scheduled to platform with a lot of spare space on the boat. It can post that schedule, the route and the space available on the GulfShare site, and other companies can contact the host company and agree on terms for that available space.
Another company might post a notice on the site saying it needs helicopter services for 4 hours a week in the central Gulf, and it has no preference for which days the helicopter works. Other companies with time to spare on helicopter services can contact that company to provide the time at a rate acceptable to both parties.
"We have a vision of getting a GulfShare agreement to share Edison Chouest vessels. We already have one for helicopters," he said.
The GulfShare participants are holding forums across the Gulf to let people know about the benefits of sharing. One of the opportunities lies in shared services for hurricane evacuation from offshore platforms. The organization may have only 40 participants now, but 70 and 80 people have been showing up at the forums.
Behind the forums is the precept that companies can "multiply benefits and divide costs," Sheffield said. "The more people, the greater the opportunity to save.
"In the future, operators will pay for moving cargo on a tons-per-mile basis and for moving people on a people-per-mile basis. We won't need to pay for the boats," he added. That means - when volumes are large enough - logistics companies such as Edison Chouest can take on the risk of fully utilizing their boats.