The Buzzard field was discovered in May 2001 and is located in the Moray Firth, central North Sea. It is the largest oilfield development in the UK North Sea for more than a decade. The development was begun by EnCana UK Ltd, which was acquired by Nexen Petroleum UK Ltd in 2004. Nexen continue to operate the field.
Case study: EnCana-Nexen Buzzard project
Service delivery problems
In 2004 EnCana approached ISN to assist with work on the Buzzard Project. This was requested after several months of successful IT infrastructure work by ISN at EnCana UK’s Uxbridge headquarters. Although EnCana was already heavily involved in the Buzzard project, the Project Team based at John Brown Engineering in Paddington were experiencing service delivery problems.
Specifically, the EnCana users at John Brown were having severe difficulty operating remotely from the project data stored at Uxbridge. Additional problems were occurring with infrastructure reliability and service level agreements. This was having a detrimental effect on the productivity of the team and the overall delivery of the project.
Thin client model
ISN, along with other members of the EnCana IT team, presented possible solutions to the executive team and eventually a new architecture and service delivery solution was agreed, based on a Citrix thin client model.
ISN then worked with the Uxbridge and Calgary teams to migrate all data, including email, from John Brown systems to the EnCana systems. The underlying infrastructure at John Brown was replaced by ISN, such that all equipment was owned and supported by EnCana rather than being supported by John Brown’s IT team. The migration and technology upgrade was entirely successful and the Project team was able to get back on track.
Remote fabrication sites
At the end of that phase of work, it was clear that the next problem was going to be the provision of services to the fabrication sites, once the Front End Engineering Design had been completed. It was therefore agreed that the solution used would be based on an MPLS service to all fabrication sites, again using the Citrix thin client model.
As a result, ISN assisted in the development of the Wide Area Network solution for the five fabrication sites that were to be used for the Buzzard platform: Spain, Norway and three in the UK. After an initial inspection of all the yards, ISN implemented a rapid one month programme of installation and commissioning at each site. This phase of the project was delivered on time and the fabrication teams were able to conduct their work unhindered. ISN handed the sites over to the IT team but remained available to provide ongoing support at any time.
Construction of Buzzard was completed in 2006 and first oil was produced in January 2007.
Further information
Client feedback on this project is available either through FPAL (First Point Assessment Limited) or contact ISN on 020 7313 8300 to get further references.