From OTC-2015, Houston: Standardisation was once again on everyone’s lips at OTC.

Ian Silk, Shell’s veep for deepwater projects, had some interesting input.

Every operator paints their subsea equipment yellow, but Silk said, ‘When I talk to the fabricators there are 28 different operator specs out there for yellow and everyone has a different view on what that paint should be.’ It’s cheaper to paint everything white anyway.

Meanwhile, Amec Foster Wheeler’s CEO Samir Brikho said the oil industry has been essentially ‘lazy’ in dealing with the need to increase levels of collaboration and standardisation.

Brikho told a breakfast panel, ‘We have been speaking about collaboration for some time, but when operators have been talking about it, it all sounds OK until they place their order. It is the same the other way with the contractors, too.’

About $500bn in capex will be spent in 2015 on an estimated 800 projects to extract about 60bnboe. According to Brikho, about $150bn could be postponed and ‘pushed to the right’, meaning greater pressure on everyone all around.

‘When the oil price was around $10/bbl operators were making around a 10% margin, but when it was $100/bbl they were still only making a 10% margin. Costs have gone up,’ he added.

Lockheed Martin’s Neale Stidolphe highlighted the aviation industry’s use of technology to reduce costs and standardise today’s aircraft.

‘We have our Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II plane. It has a 50-year design life and costs about $100mn each, but there are only three versions. Things like the cockpits in all three are the same. We do not re-engineer. That’s the product, and we offer it for sale.’

According to BP’s Ian Cummings, speaking at the International Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) panel session, the benefits of standardisation are obvious.

His company, he said, was found to be spending between $10-15mn per major project on essentially recreating procurement specifications.

In one case, the company had two different projects ordering the same piece of equipment, with one project team issuing a document with 1,200 pages of specifications, while the other project issued 800 pages of specifications, he said. Both were different in terms of what their specifications were, despite them being largely similar projects, he said.

Cummings, who is vice president of engineering in BP Upstream’s Global Projects organisation, outlined how the operator has worked hard to change that process as well as listened to feedback from its contractors. The benefits of standardising more of its specifications on similar projects are starting to show, he said.

These include reduced schedules with better predictability, a reduction in cost through removal of inefficiencies in how equipment is designed and procured, smaller operator engineering teams with the space to focus on optimising the design rather than generating new specifications, and the removal of preferential engineering.

Offshore