OK, teacher, I am ready for my lesson.
With all of that fancy stuff that you guys can now do
with multiple drilling and directional drilling and everything,
then how come it is that those rigs need to be so close together?
If you can pump 100,000 bbl a day at max capacity with one, then two will pump twice as much.
It isn’t like a small field where your pumping is limited by flow rate to the pool.
The Mars field has been one of Shell’s most important fields over the last 15 years. When we discovered the field in 1989, we estimated the field to have nearly 700 million boe of resources. To date the field has produced over 770 million boe.
Mars B will enable production to reach an estimated 1.1 billion boe. The Olympus TLP, along with our subsea tie backs West Boreas and South Deimos, will prolong access to the prolific Mars oil and natural gas field until at least 2050. We aim to start production in around 2014 and the combined development has potential to deliver production rates in the order of ~100k boe/d.
We initially developed the field using the Mars A 24 well tension leg platform. Given the field’s sizeable resources, we identified the need for extra infrastructure to boost the ongoing development of the field. In September 2010, we decided to proceed with the commercial agreements and development plans for the Mars B Project.
http://www.shell.com/global/aboutshell/major-projects-2/mars-b.html