A new approach to lowering your $/BOE production costs

Let’s face it: our industry is all about buzzwords and phrases. The latest offender in my book is “efficient operations” — something that E&Ps throw around as the core goal to their strategy … yet they have little to no idea on how to achieve it.

So, how does one make operations more efficient?

“Tech”. Any tech, and arguably all tech.

While adding people to the mix was deemed inefficient, the variety and sheer number of tech solutions E&Ps attempt to use have ultimately led to disparate systems that decrease efficiency. Which means “tech” is actually parading around as another empty buzzword that doesn’t achieve anything.

Just think for a minute:

• Has management complained that tech implementations aren’t delivering the promised value at your company?
• Are your field and engineers busy fighting fires and overwhelmed as-is with work?
• Are you still looking for additional tech to solve all your problems?

It’s a vicious cycle. E&Ps are continually adding work to systems through varying tech “solutions”, and the entire process continues to fragment more and more.

Why? Because we aren’t focusing on the core problem: the foundation of operations — workflow.

Skeptical? Let’s dig deeper into the actual goal we all desire first: lowering $/BOE production costs.

First, let’s define the basics:

Production cost is the total cost of operations, including:

• Rig interventions
• Fluid hauling
• Labor
• Parts
• Infrastructure (digital & field)
• Technology applications
• Vendors
• Compression
• Artificial lift

This sum is divided by operations production (BOE):

Operations Cost $ ÷ Operations production BOE

Workflow is — hang with me here — the flow of work. I know, groundbreaking. It’s identifying an issue, assigning it to the right people, and evaluating results. Workflow is a continuous cycle of improving processes as knowledge and solutions grow.

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Work identifications impact on $/BOE

Work identification includes the processes, people, and systems used to identify work accurately.

A lot goes into identifying the right work to execute each day. If identification is done poorly, it consequently increases $/BOE.

Stop and think of all the systems you currently use. Can you count them on one hand?

In my experience, I used SCADA, Excel, FDC app, email, numerous Power BI & Spotfire reports, texts, a few sexy tech systems, a few in-house tech wannabes, shared folders on One-Drive, Microsoft Teams, phone calls… the list goes on.

That’s the standard of work identification in the industry today and to be frank, it’s unacceptable, outdated, inefficient, and entirely demotivating.

Achieve low $/BOE productions costs with workflow

At Tasq, we aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. We simply believe that E&Ps can improve their production costs by thoughtfully reducing work in the system.

We’ve defined the simple concepts that can reduce work and improve work identification — all packaged concisely into our platform:

• Remove false positives: SCADA anomaly detection improves with user feedback of falses & positives
• Value work appropriately: Stop using shitty target models
• Measure effectiveness of work: Use a better method for field data capture
• Democratize knowledge: narrow the knowledge gap between staff
• Utilize scale: lower the experience barrier for the staff to identify & action work
• Reward right behaviors: Track work and drive behavior change

Combined, these strategies can lead to reduced failure rates, lower cycle times, more effective work, and less work in the system, which means … improved production cost for your business!

With Tasq, you can consolidate your tech into one system that accurately automates your organization’s identification & distribution of work.

Stay tuned for next week’s article discussing work prioritization & assignments. You cannot accurately assign & prioritize work without an accurate system for work identification. In preparation for next weeks discussion, think about this: Can route optimization ever work for field staff if the work is 75% accurate?

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