The production and drilling crews of the good ship Auger along with the operations leadership team just before first oil in April 1994. (Image courtesy of Shell)

In 1987, industry pundits had dubbed the GoM the “dead sea.” Oil was around US $15 a barrel, and drilling in 2,000 ft (610 m) of water seemed impossible to most. The promise of hydrocarbons was there, and Shell continued to acquire deepwater leases, despite the fact that the technology to develop them did not yet exist.
As geologists pored over seismic data, a talented group of young engineers began work in earnest to develop the company’s first tension-leg platform (TLP), later known as Auger.

TLPs were not a new concept — Conoco had already installed a TLP in 485 ft (148 m) of water in the North Sea and was working on another, Joliet, for the Gulf — but Auger was a far more ambitious project.

The platform would operate in 2,860 ft (872 m), more than twice the depth of any existing facility. It would be the first floating structure in the GoM with full production facilities and an integrated drilling rig.

The industry watched with a skeptical eye as Shell embarked on its ever-increasing foray into deepwater technology. Given the technical challenges and the price of oil, could deepwater wells be profitable?

“The industry thought our concept was too risky, too expensive and frankly, couldn’t be done,” said Dale Snyder, now project manager for Shell’s Perdido project.
“But we just had a ‘can do’ attitude. It was a chance to invent a new solution,” Snyder said.

The leap from fixed platform to floating production was indeed a significant challenge, but Shell engineers had been studying the tension-leg concept for years, and their aim with Auger was not to reinvent the wheel, but to extend technology incrementally and build on past successes.

A lot was riding on Auger, because it would be the pacesetter platform from which Shell could plan its deepwater development strategy. The company had already established its technical dominance with record-breaking drilling depths. Now it was time to close the gap between drilling and producing from those depths.

“When I first started with Shell, I remember sitting in on a meeting for the Bullwinkle project, which was slated for 1,350 ft (412 m) of water, and I was just awed by the scope of it,” Snyder said.

Soon after, he began work on a tension-leg mooring system for a platform that would ultimately more than double Bullwinkle’s record-setting depths. “I was a fairly inexperienced engineer at the time,” Snyder said, “but I was around more technically competent engineers, and as I was learning I absorbed the confidence of the more experienced people. It was an innovative, creative team.”

Curtis Lohr, a civil engineer, was responsible for the Auger lateral mooring system (LMS) as the lead design engineer, then as the LMS project engineer; it was his first major engineering project, and one that he remembers as “trial by fire.”

“At the time, 3,000 ft (915 m) of water was ultra deep in the Gulf of Mexico, so the question was, how were we going to develop a mooring system that would position the platform over the wells during drilling operations, assist in resisting storm forces, extend the manufacturing boundaries for steel wire rope and chain, and yet also be reliable and cost effective,” he said. The team was aware that they were establishing standards not only within Shell, but for the rest of the offshore industry.

More than any other project undertaken before, Auger required a high degree of collaboration between engineering disciplines, and no one system could be designed in isolation.

The integrated, collaborative way of working that developed as a result became the standard for engineering projects going forward. As Auger’s final design was brought to life, there was plenty of trial and error, testing, and retesting. Given the price of oil and escalating costs, there would be little tolerance for misjudgment once the platform was fabricated. But it was doubly frustrating for contractors as specifications changed, and then changed again.

“I didn’t even know what a TLP was,” said Paul Mendel, an experienced operator with Shell whose assignment was to make sure that whatever the engineers designed did not have any operational issues and could be maintained.

“There were lots of ‘serial number 1’ when Auger was built,” he said. When the platform was commissioned in 1994, it established a number of engineering milestones for Shell, and the industry as a whole, including the world record water depth for a permanent structure at 2,962 ft (598 m). Despite the successful installation, tough operational issues lay ahead.

As they brought the first well online, instead of flowing at the expected 8,000 b/d of oil, it came in around 2,000 b/d. Not bad, in those days, but drastically below expectations.

Chris Smith, drilling engineer at the time, was in the hot seat. “It was the longest two months of my life,” he said. He refused to leave the platform, didn’t sleep and was observed by crewmembers pacing the platform trying to determine what was preventing the well from flowing.

At first, he and his team thought it was strictly a mechanical issue, and as they worked to solve it, they completed the second well. “The nightmare continued when the second well came on at still lower rates and higher drawdown than the first well,” Smith said. “It was amazing how quickly the word was getting out in the industry about the problems that Auger was having.

“The promise of high rates and high ultimates that was the backbone of deepwater development for the entire industry was suddenly being questioned,” he said.

In retrospect, the problem was straightforward. The acid they used to clean up and stimulate the well after perforation was creating calcium carbonate scale that was in effect plugging up the pore space. Luckily, there was also an easy remedy.

Over the next few weeks, acid treatments were pumped into both completions, and by June, production for the two wells had ramped up to approximately 17,000 b/d.
“The proverbial ‘monkey’ had all of a sudden jumped off of my back and landed squarely on the facility engineers,” he said, who were faced with modifying the facility to be able to handle everything the wells could produce.

Engineers scrambled again to reconfigure the topsides, which was initially designed to process 40,000 b/d.

“Auger was a game changer for us,” Rick Fox, who was one of the first offshore installation managers for Shell, said. “There were so many new paradigms for a platform that size with simultaneous drilling and producing operations.“We put together a plan to produce, process, and ship, and we needed a different model for how we were going to run. We used three different teams and focused on decision-making, involvement and engagement.

“We learned so much from Auger that it transformed our business. People came to Auger to experience what empowerment looked like,” Fox said.

With the success of the first two wells, plus an expansion into surrounding opportunities, Auger reached 100,000 b/d, a tremendous accomplishment in its own right. “The challenge for Auger was to both execute a TLP — which was a new development system in deep water — and to build an organization that could handle the new challenges of a deepwater development,” said Tom Bourgeois, who was responsible for every aspect of the Auger asset, including the project execution, the drilling, the subsurface, the operational readiness, and startup. He is now Shell’s global chief project engineer.

“One vital challenge that Auger faced was to seed the deepwater developments that followed Auger — namely Mars, Ram Powell and Ursa,” Bourgeois said.

New projects were staffed by personnel from Auger, and despite the high turnover rate, successful operations at Auger were maintained. In fact, the processes established on Auger were later used as the blueprint for revamping all other Shell US operations throughout the 1990s.

“A lot of talented people started up at Auger, and we kept exporting them to different parts of the organization because they had developed the ability to manage and lead others,” Fox added.

The early Auger experience continues to influence ongoing work throughout Shell. Twenty years later, water depths that were once considered extraordinary are now commonplace, and Shell’s Perdido project, expected to come online around the turn of the decade, continues to push the deepwater envelope in depths of around 8,000 ft (2,440 m).