Crescent Petroleum Selects SLB for Digital Field Development Planning Contract

Crescent Petroleum entered a three-year contract with SLB to deploy agile digital field development planning across its upstream oil and gas assets. The deployment integrates subsurface data, surface facilities design, and capital economics into a unified workflow for asset development in the Middle East and North Africa.

Operational Scope and Integration Challenges
Field development planning requires evaluating subsurface simulations alongside drilling constraints, facility capacities, and operational expenditures. Conventional hydrocarbon asset evaluation relies on discrete departments operating isolated software packages. This sequential handover model between reservoir engineers, facilities designers, and financial planners creates data latency, compounding uncertainties during capital project evaluations.

To eliminate workflow fragmentation, Crescent Petroleum expanded its operational infrastructure beyond isolated reservoir modelling into an enterprise-wide planning architecture. SLB provides the digital infrastructure and system engineering, while Crescent Petroleum applies the operational workflows across its exploration and production assets.

System Architecture and Technical Implementation
The deployment centers on the FDPlan digital field development planning solution, hosted within the cloud-based Delfi digital platform. The system operates by linking subsurface models, well placement trajectories, surface facilities parameters, production forecasts, and economic variables inside a shared database architecture.

When reservoir engineers modify simulation inputs, downstream facility requirements and economic returns recalculate across the dependent models. This direct digital connection enables multidisciplinary engineering teams to run iterative sensitivity analyses and compare complex field development scenarios earlier in project lifecycles.

Reservoir Simulation Performance Parameters
The implementation builds on established reservoir engineering workflows within the Delfi platform. Utilizing cloud-based scalable high-performance computing, the infrastructure demonstrated verified performance benchmarks during reservoir analysis.

For complex dual-porosity and dual-permeability reservoir models containing millions of grid cells, high-performance parallel processing reduced compute simulation times from six hours to 50 minutes. The automated throughput allowed technical teams to complete approximately 140 simulation cycles in one month — encompassing history matching and forward production predictions — compared to 20 cycles under previously deployed on-premises computing hardware.

Engineering Impact and Strategic Rationale
Transitioning cross-discipline asset planning into an integrated digital infrastructure establishes continuous feedback between geological risk models and economic thresholds.

“Connecting reservoir insight with engineering and economic considerations gives teams a more complete view of development options and strengthens the basis for planning and investment decisions,” stated Dany Rahal, Managing Director, UAE, SLB.

The expanded architecture standardizes asset data schemas, enabling concurrent engineering workflows that shorten technical evaluation timelines and increase capital allocation precision across the regional asset portfolio.

Edited by Evgeny Churilov, Induportals Media - Adapted by AI.

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