Client: Major Oil Company
Location: International
Challenge: Following an incident during well operations offshore, the company and their insurers required an independent and objective account of the incident.
Solution: Both parties agreed to commission Aberdeen Drilling School to review all the evidence, and agreed to accept the findings of our team of independent experts. Led by our Chief Technical Officer (CTO), our team of well control specialists facilitated arbitration between the two parties in order to reach an agreement relating to the insurance claim.
Over the past 40 years, we have continuously evolved the services that we offer to the international oil & gas industry to include independent technical consultancy and arbitration. Our consultancy services include technical auditing, authoring, incident reviews and investigations with a specific focus on well operations.
We’ve developed a comprehensive Arbitration Service in response to client requests to look at specific unplanned well incidents and provide an independent technical view on the root cause and consequences of these incidents. We provide concise technical advice often supported by recreated simulations of the incident, detailed surface and subsurface modelling of well pressure and flow regimes, as well as root cause investigation services. Led by our CTO, our specialist team of experienced drilling engineers independently review all operational records, conduct interviews with relevant rig-site personnel, and model the incident in simulated real-time using actual well data, in order to make informed decisions required to facilitate arbitration between the parties involved.
In this most recent case, the Arbitration team was invited to carry out a technical review of a major offshore incident, which arose during an offshore drilling operation. The incident was the subject of an insurance claim, and the two parties involved, the well operator and the insurers, had reached differing interpretations of the event and were unable to agree on how the insurance claim should be settled.
Given full access to both party’s personnel and data, our team was able to fully analyse the well incident. This was combined with one-to-one interviews with the personnel involved in order to resolve the complex operational practices which led to the incident .
In piecing together the wide variety of technical information and personal accounts, our team was able conduct a thorough root cause analysis and draw categorical conclusions of how the incident unfolded.
Our team facilitated a quick and successful resolution to this dispute avoiding the need to seek a judicial review in court.
“This project’s success hinged on the free flow of information and key data, and we were grateful to facilitate communications between mutually respectful parties throughout this case.” – CTO, Aberdeen Drilling School