Tapping into logistics

With the industry of power generation being one of competition and logistics, Allangba Faustin deconstructs his experiences within the field and offers some advice on how to survive.

“What is good about natural gas in the Ivory Coast is that we don’t burn or flare the gas. We sell all that we produce to the power plants”
-Allangba Faustin

The world of power generation thrives on the work of many through the inspiration of a few; evolving technology and updated methods have undoubtedly shrunk the distance between this dynamic in recent decades, yet it still remains true to its core. In order to achieve any substantial gain, one must either carry the luckiest charm in the world – and still believe in faith – or work in harmony with diligence and risk in a field that requires unequivocal levels of experience and comprehension.

With 60 members of staff spanning five departments, Allangba Faustin, Manager of Engineering and Production for PETROCI, is part of the latter. Overseeing all aspects of the company from drilling to reservoir, production and gas distribution engineering, Faustin takes an avid interest in everything PETROCI both upstream and down – including their marketing.

“This morning,” smiles Faustin, “I had a meeting with all five of the departments to give them instruction and coordinate activity on the platform and also on the gasoline units. They’re the units that when we buy the natural gas, we take it through a system that extracts the heavy part of the gas, then we light that part before it is sent to the relevant industrial sites. This is what we do on a daily basis as the engineering and production managers at PETROCI.”

Discovery

In addition to the daily influx of checks and routines, PETROCI have also undertaken vast levels of work with 3D reservoir modeling, some of which has led to important commercial discoveries on the Ivory Coast.

“We make discoveries through seismic and various other techniques that can be used to have a prospect on another’ a well makes the discovery. We put all the data in our simulation model, which can help us set down a field production plant. The model will tell us what we should drill at different places and at which places we should drill to optimise our production. The model will also tell us the recovery factor, how much oil we can produce and for how long we can produce this oil. With the same model, we can display all the reservoir parameters such as fruit saturation, water saturation and the evolution of this kind of saturation during the lifetime of a field. Based on this we can estimate the cost of a plant that we are going to put down to produce the field.”

Essentially, the model details precisely which time the desired production will be delivered alongside how long the field will be producing and how many wells need to be drilled in order to produce the field. In addition, the necessary water quantities that need to be injected in order to support the reservoir pressure – and on the odd occasion how much gas is needed to perform a gas lift – is also registered by the model; while it is without doubt a model of complexity, it provides Faustin with all the information needed to optimise production. “This is how it works,” continues Faustin. “When I was just an engineer this is the work I was doing. Now I’m the manager I have staff doing this job every day at PETROCI for the company.

“Our biggest finding is a field in Cote d’lvoire that was made in 2001. There’s water there ranging from 1500 metres to 2000 metres offshore. It is the biggest finding in deep water right now in the Ivory Coast and we havea reserve of around 200 million barrels of oil and about 150 TFC or recoverable and associated gas. Besides that, we also have a small discovery but on the gas side in shallow water offshore.

“Then we have our older fields like the Espoir field that we have been producing for about seven years. This field had been discovered by Feliz Petroleum back in the 1980s and had been produced for some time from 1982 to 1990. Since the oil price was declining, Feliz found that it was no longer economic and they abandoned the field.

“In early 2000, Ranjha Oil came and took over the field and started producing it with water injection and secondary recovery generators. This field now produces at an extremely good rate with the water injection; something around 20,000 barrels of oil per day and about 18 million cubic feet of natural gas is sold. What is good about natural gas in the Ivory Coast is that we don’t burn or flare the gas. We sell all that we produce to the power plants.”

Challenges

Despite the seeming ease that Faustin discusses the gas and oil producing fields with, there still remains many challenges in deep water production – specifically those of an engineering context. To begin with, a significantly viable commercial discovery has to be made and approved before any sniff of a development plant can emerge. Using the Ivory Coast as an example, however,  Faustin declares that while their commercial fields are not that big when compared to Ghana or Nigeria, they have set up a development plant that can be extremely economic, both in the building and running of the plant. What becomes clear is that materials and techniques that are not too expensive are pivotal in beating the challenge of economic production.

“The most recent challenge we had was solving how to get one of our more recent fields to produce. First, when we discovered the field, we used what we call an expandable sand control system (ESS) to prevent sun entering the well. Unfortunately, after one year of production the system failed, putting us from 50,000 barrels per day to something around 16,000 barrels per day. We had to return to our studies, go back and re-drill part of the well with a brand new system. We did that and it seems to work right now, so we’ve gone back from 16,00 barrels per day to around 26,000-27,000 barrels of oil per day.”

On the other end of the spectrum to the challenges facing producers such as Faustin is the technology that helps them on a daily basis. Specific to PETROCI is the use of geophysical technology and its ability to improve exploration risk rates and reduce costs within unconventional resources such as oil shale. Faustin details an example of an inversion technique of 3D seismic interpretation that an engineer used to identify a clear flat spot in the natural gas side of the field that worked to full effect, so it is without doubt that the technology is helping on levels that no other can. But even with this new-found helping hand, the world’s rising energy demand is stirring up uncertainties within the future of the industry with regards to the old adage of supply being able to keep up with demand.

“We’ll be able to keep up with demand,” asserts Faustin, “but only for the next 20 to 50 years. However, I think that it will be difficult to keep up with the demand. Beyond that, we need to think about some new kind of energy. It may be cheap, it may be more expensive than oil energy, but we need to think about some kind of new energy. There are so many of them. Right now people think oil is expensive – I don’t think so. All the alternative energy from the oil is more expensive than the oil. Using technology to press, for example to get something out of cane or an agricultural product, is an energy that has some cost.

“For the near future we still have oil. We’re currently running some more discovery outlets deep offshore in places like Brazil and the Ivory Coast – specifically some speculative seismic in roughly 3000 metres to 4000 metres of water. We think that we can keep up with discovery to keep up with the demand for the next coming 20 to 50 years, but after that we need to have something else that will come up to face the demand of energy in the world.”

Whilst others may argue with the specifics, Faustin has certainly hit the metaphorical nail on the head – but until the time that a viable and infinite alternative energy source is uncovered, it will remain in the hands of people like Allangba Faustin and companies such as PETROCI to continue tapping into our word’s resources and providing the people with what they need: Energy.

Allangba Faustin is the Engineering and Production Manager of PETROCI. He graduated from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a degree in Petroleum Engineering in 1981. He then completed an MSc degree in Engineering Management from the same University in 1982. He started his petroleum engineering career at PETROCI, the Côte d'Ivoire national petroleum company, in March 1983.