Jennifer Pallanich, senior technology editor, Hart Energy: I am here at the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) with Bart Joppe. He is the well abandonment leader for Baker Hughes and we're talking about extracting value from mature assets. Why is that important?
Bart Joppe, well abandonment leader, Baker Hughes: Well, it's important for our operators to function in the energy trilemma to provide sustainable, affordable and secure energy. When you extract more resources from your mature assets, you actually have an economical, sustainable and security benefit.
JP: So how do you do that?
BJ: We do that by taking the solutioning approach. So, we first try to understand the problem we need to solve for our customers and then we have a multidisciplinary approach which starts with the subsurface and then we look at the well and how we can get more productivity out of that.
JP: Can you give me an example?
BJ: Absolutely. We obviously have different teams within mature asset solutions. This includes sand, water and gas management. Here, for example, we have remedial sand control solutions where we use BeadScreen, one of our proprietary products to keep the sand out of the well and we can run that through tubing so that you don't have to complete a well and recomplete it.
JP: All right, so that sounds pretty comprehensive in its approach. So why is it important to securely close down a well when you're done?
BJ: Yeah, so at the end when you have no more economic recovery reserves, then we look at the well abandonment, which is the team I'm looking after. It's really important that we seal the well properly, so no future leakage occurs. There we also take a cost-effective approach. So we look at how can we do this with a smaller footprint at surface and make combination to so complete the scope of work step by step within the shortest time possible with the minimum footprint we have at surface.
JP: Can you give me an example of using this approach?
BJ: Absolutely. For example, our Terminator tool, which is there to remove subsea wellheads, you don't need the semi-submersible to run it. You can actually run it from the back deck of a very small vessel. And that actually helps us to keep down the cost but also to keep down the emissions on the environment while we're doing that.
JP: All right, excellent. Thank you so much for spending some time walking me through this today.
BJ: You're welcome.
JP: And that's a wrap at OTC. Thank you.
