Gearing Up: Operations Readiness

Working together to prepare for first oil

As we work toward first oil, ExxonMobil and SBM have invested significant time and effort in building the organization in Guyana that will support production operations.

Mike Ryan, the production operations manager established in Guyana in 2018, has facilitated the transition to in-country ownership of operations readiness. The team has made great strides in building the organization in Guyana, hiring personnel for functions including subsurface engineering, human resources, IT, technicians, logistics and others.

Several key workshops between the ExxonMobil and SBM teams took place in Singapore during the fourth quarter of 2018. A systems completion workshop and a maintenance equipment strategy workshop gave the teams an opportunity to further share lessons learned and uncovered some potential considerations for production that hadn’t been previously raised.

In Guyana, a workshop with the ExxonMobil and SBM operations teams and in-country function representatives set the vision on what everyone needed to accomplish by year-end 2018. It also helped refocus the team on the big picture for the Liza projects and upcoming 2019 activities. Participants developed a strong understanding of how to work effectively as One Team.

On the procurement front, we have identified the spares needed to support FPSO operations. Our goal is to approve all spares needed by February 2019; we will begin purchasing those spares shortly thereafter. We anticipate that by the end of the first quarter of 2019, we will have completed about 70 percent of the key milestones for operations readiness.

Russell Carter, operations readiness technical coordinator, ExxonMobil