ABERDEEN, Scotland—The offshore oil and gas industry is progressing toward field development activities in water depths of up to 4,000 m (13,124 ft) by the year 2025, according to one of the world’s leading deepwater operators.

French major Total has pioneered some of the deepest projects in the world, including several major flagship developments offshore Angola. These include the Girassol, Dalia, Pazflor and CLOV developments.

“By the year 2020 a water depth of 3,000 m (9,843 ft), from an oil development perspective, seems to be achievable,” Jeremy Cutler, head of technology innovation at Total E&P UK, told delegates at SPE Offshore Europe 2015. “We see that by 2025 the expectation is that 4,000 m will be achieved.”

While discussing technology challenges the company is facing, Cutler described water depths of 500 m and deeper as deepwater, with depths of 1,500 m beyond deemed ultradeepwater. “The new frontier is beyond 3,000 m, which we term ‘frontier deepwater.’ More than 50% of Total’s exploration portfolio is in deep and ultradeepwater, so it will be very much a big part of our future and where much of our production revenue is going to come from.”

However, high development costs for this type of technology-intensive project make it hard to launch new developments in the current low oil price climate, he admitted. As a result Total and the industry as a whole are being driven to study further ways to reduce development costs.

“The challenge for us now, going forward, is ‘How do we go deeper, longer— and cheaper?’” Cutler said.

Total and Royal Dutch Shell, he added, are leading the other majors in the push to develop frontier deepwater areas. The majors generally hold by far the largest average areas in terms of frontier deepwater acreage.

But frontier deepwater technology gaps in areas such as pipelay and risers, subsea processing and the mooring of FPSOs must be addressed, he said, while highlighting the long-term ambition to “remove the floater from the equation and go subsea-to-beach.”

Currently, Total is developing the deepwater Laggan-Tormore gas field West of Shetland, offshore the U.K., in this manner. Plans are for the field to be operational by year-end 2015. The field’s development is enabling a 665 MMcf/d gas export route from the area. Cutler described Laggan-Tormore as “having been a good test of subsea-to-beach for us.”

Asked how the industry can prove the business case for subsea processing, he said the industry had to work harder to get around the problems, which means it is taking it longer to get to the final solution.

“These deepwater fields are bigger, which really helps the economics,” he said. “But the oil price is making us work that much harder to get a solution that works.”

Mark Thomas can be reached at mthomas@hartenergy.com.

Offshore