SLB Expands Collaborative Digital Field Planning with Vår Energi

SLB and Vår Energi have expanded their technical collaboration to deploy a cloud-native digital platform across the Norwegian Continental Shelf. The deployment integrates subsurface evaluation, well design, and production workflows to accelerate development planning for mature offshore assets and subsea tiebacks.

Integrated Engineering and Operational Challenges
Managing mature offshore oil and gas basins requires operators to evaluate complex subsea tiebacks and marginal discoveries under tight timeline constraints. Traditional workflows rely on sequential engineering data handoffs between separate disciplines, including exploration geology, reservoir engineering, drilling, and subsea structural design. This disjointed structure often leads to data silos, formatting friction, and repetitive rework, which extends field planning cycles over several months.

To address these complexities, the engineering teams required a shared digital infrastructure capable of processing multidimensional subsurface and production data concurrently rather than sequentially.

Technical Architecture of the Cloud Platform
The technical solution centers on the deployment of the Delfi digital platform across Vår Energi’s operational network. Operating in a cloud-native environment, the platform centralizes data access and standardizes automated workflows across the following operational domains:

The platform uses unified data models to ensure that a modification in one domain — such as a changed well path — automatically updates the dependent parameters in the subsea design and reservoir simulation modules. This synchronization reduces engineering handoffs and enforces data integrity across cross-functional teams.

Deployment and Industrial Impact
Vår Energi is implementing this digital infrastructure across its assets on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. By migrating historical and real-time field data into the unified cloud environment, the operator connects its subsurface teams directly with production engineers. SLB provides the underlying software-as-a-service infrastructure, system integration, and technical support to maintain workflow continuity with existing legacy databases.

Initial operational validation of the collaborative well planning module demonstrated that planning cycle times were reduced from months to days. By scaling this concurrent engineering approach to encompass complete field development planning, the companies aim to achieve comparable reductions in the time required to progress assets from the initial discovery phase to final investment decisions.

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

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