Vito Project: Vito Field Development

Abstract

The Vito field is located in 4,100 feet of water producing from reservoirs nearly 30,000 feet below sea level. Vito was discovered in 2009 approximately 135 miles southwest of New Orleans, Louisiana. The project underwent major field development strategy change to remain competitive in 2015 oil price environment and price resiliency going forward. The Vito project was seen as a strategic fit to the operator's existing Mars Corridor. The original Vito development strategy was to build a clone of the mega-project of Appomattox to maximize Net Present Value and Ultimate Recovery. However, as the market changed vastly in 2015, the project team refreshed the design concept to focus on capital efficiency. This paper provides an overview of the overall revised Field Development Concept of Vito. Vito has best in class resource density when compared to other Gulf of Mexico fields, which allows for a compact field development of 8 subsea wells at a single drill center. This allowed the project to not include a drilling rig on the host platform and instead deploy a new generation Deepwater rig for drilling and completions. There is severe depletion drilling risk on Vito which led the project to drill and complete all 8 wells prior to first oil. To improve ultimate recovery with low capital efficiency in well bore gas lift was included in the design. In addition, the Mars Corridor export system was looked at and required debottlenecking on both the oil and gas side. This paper is part of a Vito Project series at OTC 2023, and the other papers are listed in the references.