In February 2020, as the world followed the news of the coronavirus outbreak, an employee of the Khafji Joint Operations company stared intently at dead gauges and sensors on a big screen waiting for it to come to life. Suddenly, the screen sensors and gauges started moving up and down. Outside the control room, a junior operator leaned on the 36-inch pipe coming from the offshore fields’ gathering station, listening closely and touching the pipe to feel its temperature. He shouted to his fellow operators “it is here, it is coming, I can feel it and I can hear it rumbling!” Finally, after a five year shutdown, the first wave of oil reached the onshore processing facility.
Khafji Joint Operations (KJO) is a joint oil & gas production operation out of the Offshore Divided Zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Aramco Gulf Operations Company (AGOC) oversees Saudi Arabia’s interests in the offshore area, while Kuwait Gulf Oil Company (KGOC) oversees the interests of Kuwait.
Production out of KJO fields was shut down in October 2014 to upgrade KJO’s production and injection facilities and to add new gas handling facilities to comply with environmental regulations. It took a toll on operations as well as the economic prosperity of Khafji city and its residents.
A much awaited agreement was signed between the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments in December 2019, ushering in the resumption of production. The stakes were high and both countries and shareholders had high expectations from the joint operations and its people.
Through a high degree of commitment and strong concerted efforts, KJO met its deadline and succeeded in resuming partial production on 21 February 2020 and fully just two days later.
“Despite all challenges, with teamwork and collaboration we came up with brilliant creative solutions and new initiatives leading us to accomplish the mission with continuing high standards of safety and environmental regulations,” said Abdullah bin Abdulrahman Al-Utaibi, KJO’s executive director of operations.
In May 2018, KJO’s management requested the formation of a cross-functional taskforce team to develop a roadmap to ensure the readiness of production assets and facilities for safe startup after the five-year-long shutdown. That roadmap was known as Operations Readiness Assurance (ORA).
The taskforce team broke ORA into three distinct phases of execution. Phase 1 entailed facility de-mothballing, turnover & inspection, turnaround & overhaul maintenance, facility box-up and preservation, refreshing operator training, procurement of critical materials, tendering of critical contracts, recruiting experienced personnel, and HSE compliance.
Phase 1 was challenging and stimulating. Its objective was to ensure that facilities were verified as safe and ready for the resumption of production. That resulted in extensive efforts to ensure that facilities were in line with their original design specifications. ORA’s taskforce was under a lot of pressure to deliver under unprecedented circumstances, yet the team’s spirit and morale were very high and they darted towards their mandate with a lot of enthusiasm.
Since not only facilities but also people had to be ready for the resumption of production, the training and certification of operations manpower was one of ORA’s cornerstones. As a result, more than 3,000 training courses were delivered to the operations staff, covering both technical and safety topics.
As for facilities, preparing for startup was no small feat by any stretch of the imagination. KJO completed the full testing, inspection, repair, and preservation of all piping and subsea pipelines, covering around 2,400 km, more than 5,200 control and safety valves, and over 6,000 vessels and equipment. In addition, 240 major rotating equipment were overhauled, preserved, and reinstated under the supervision of their original manufacturers. Furthermore, 41 leaking and outdated expansion joints at the crude filling and loading piping system were fully repaired and brought back into shape.
One of the major risk areas that KJO’s offshore operations team faced was uncertainty about the integrity of the subsea pipelines, which posed potential environmental and production reliability risks. It was next-to-impossible to predict the condition of those pipelines in the first place, which led the ORA team to develop and execute a robust integrity management strategy that entailed pressure-testing the pipelines up to normal operating pressure levels, while taking precautions to avoid leaks and standing ready to respond promptly in case of any line failures.
Towards the end of November 2019, the ORA team successfully completed Phase 1 and was standing ready to receive the green light from concerned authorities to move on to Phases 2 & 3 for a period of 60 days prior to the initial start-up. It did not take long for KJO to receive those directives. On 25 December 2019, the Saudi and Kuwaiti government authorities directed KJO to commence Phases 2 & 3 in preparation for production resumption from offshore producing to onshore receiving facilities.
The ORA team subjected all processing facilities, storage tanks, and loading terminals to extensive safety preparations. The installation of all major pumps and gas compressors associated with the functional tests and the commissioning of process packages and systems increased the confidence level of the team. They were all performed to the highest levels of safety and in full compliance with applicable standards and environmental regulations (PME). We completed almost 15.8 million man-hours without a lost time injury. On 21 February 21 2020 and within an exceptional period of less than two months (with about 46% of that time period experiencing rough weather that disturbed the continuity of offshore work activities), all offshore facilities came on-stream without a glitch. Onshore facilities received crude in cold circulation, ready for warmup and achieving stable operations.
KJO kicked off its resumption of production at a minimum rate of 80,000 barrels of oil per day. Once plant conditions become steady, the production was quickly ramped up to its initial target, while monitoring gas flaring to maintain it within the PME set limits for the year 2020.
One success milestone led to another and by 22 March 2020, the gas plant was re-started in a smooth manner and with no time wasted on troubleshooting.
Despite all the success milestones that the team has witnessed, it was not all smooth sailing. The journey was dotted with a number of operational challenges, on top of the time constraints, and those challenges were further exacerbated by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which cast a long shadow on workforce and contractor availability.
In response to that, KJO’s management took immediate measures to help mitigate the effects of the pandemic on the operation. First and foremost, KJO’s management created a Risk Management Committee that monitored the situation on a daily basis, demonstrated business continuity models under a range of potential scenarios, determined the essential manpower required for business continuity, changed shift working hours to avail additional manpower to compensate for the shortage, utilized available manpower to work two shifts (12-hours each) instead of three shifts, granted VPN access to other staff to provide support remotely where applicable, obtained special border crossing permits from government authorities for employees residing in Kuwait, and provided close-by accommodation to certain employees.
The challenges posed by COVID-19 became even more prominent during the month of Ramadan, especially with operators working 12-hour day shifts while fasting. The troubleshooting of facilities became also challenging with difficulties in mobilizing critical vendors and with materials suppliers delivering spare parts on time, as an alternative vendors’ packaged type equipment were commissioned remotely with success which is first time to happen in the globe.
Resolve, determination, and commitment made it all happen for KJO despite all challenges. Resolve, determination, and commitment has created success so far and will continue to create success going into the future.
