5 - Project management in oil and gas

5 - Project management in oil and gas

Oil sands

Megaprojects

Project management

Oil industry

Fracking technology

High-reward culture

Low-carbon future

Supplier-assumed risks

After construction and aerospace, oil and gas are perhaps the biggest proponents of project management, with upstream exploration and production projects that typify the inexorable linkage of these two sectors. Upstream oil and gas megaprojects, with their huge investments and exceedingly long project lifetimes, should be learning their lessons in good project management from their predecessors in construction, but as this Chapter explains, unfortunately, this is not the case. This Chapter begins by summarizing best practices in project management and reinforcing the particular characteristics of project management and details the differences between this and normal day-to-day operational management. All projects should have a fully developed business case and rationale behind them. Financial appraisal models are discussed

these include Payback and Net Present Value. Any project justification will also have evaluated risk and uncertainty

the former can be mitigated by good project management

uncertainty can never be eliminated, no matter how good the management. The basic tools of project management—network planning, task estimation and managing problems—are all discussed in the context of the oil and gas sector. Various contracting options are detailed, including several variants of Engineering, Procurement ad Construction, and then Build-Own-Operate-Transfer, Design-Build, and the ever increasingly popular Turnkey contract approach. This Chapter is also an appropriate place to debate the future development of fossil fuels, as this may impact the project management discipline of the industry. So, shale oil, unconventional crudes, synthetic production, and Gas-to-Liquid technology are all critically assessed for both their viability and sustainability. Concluding sections debate OPEC's waning power and the future transition for oil and gas to electrification, especially electric vehicles, and solar photovoltaics, ending at the very topical transition of recent years that is seeing traditional oil and gas supermajors reinvent themselves as energy companies. The low-carbon future, as promised by governments across the globe, will not be an easy transition ride, given petroleum products' intense energy content density. The industry giants have seemingly bucked notices of their demise before, in a very long history

there are signs today that the industry players will continue to adapt, meet the challenges and move on to serve their customers and shareholders alike in very new energy markets.

Rural Electrification

2021

2021-01-01

bookSection

978-0-12-822403-8

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128224038000059