Watch out where you walk!
Majnoon, Southern Iraq – Project Management
- Chemical
- Oil & Gas
Date of Completion
Project Management in One of the World’s Most Complex Oil Fields
The name for one of the largest concentrations of oil beneath a single stretch of land, Majnoon, means “crazy” in Arabic. (Wikipedia: Majnoon oil field) Straddling the border with Iran, it was a flashpoint during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and the area is still littered extensively with mine fields, making development of the oil field an “interesting challenge”, some might even say “crazy”.
Challenge
How do you make the investment economics work for an oil processing plant and a power plant able to deal with sour gas/crude oil, while oil prices were low and when industry cost trends point higher year-on-year?
Solutions
The project team decided to embed the principles of the brand-new Project Management Framework, applying a risk-based, outcome-focused mindset.
A multi-disciplinary team meticulously assessed hundreds of “must do” requirements in the standard design specifications. Every “must” was challenged for relevance and applicability in the scope of this project. This led to a reduction in 60% in these requirements.
Early involvement from contractors and industry experts further helped with designing an optimal contracting strategy focussed on flexibility and defining functional outcomes rather than mandating every little component. This “black-box approach” leveraged contractor expertise to propose optimal technical solutions that met the operator’s requirements.
During the whole process, proactive stakeholder engagement was critical to ensure the decisions taken were supported and would not lead to late change if reversed later.
Outcomes
This approach resulted in a 40% cost reduction for the oil processing facility, compared to a similar plant constructed during the initial development phase some two years earlier.
