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Borneo Bulletin Yearbook 2020
BSP…FUELLING BRUNEI’S FUTURE
Since the discovery of the Seria field in 1929,
Brunei Darussalam has forged an enduring
partnership with Royal Dutch Shell, a relationship
that reaches back more than nine decades.
From its humble beginnings, Brunei Shell
Petroleum (BSP) is now the largest oil and gas
company in the Sultanate, boasting a diverse
and highly qualified workforce of around 4,000
employees and more than 20,000 contractors. To
this day, BSP remains as the backbone of Brunei’s
economy and a major contributor to the nation’s
oil & gas revenue and export earnings, supporting
the growth and development of the country.
BSP’s core activities include exploring for, and
producing, oil and gas from onshore and offshore
fields for domestic use and export to international
markets. These operations are supported by
skilled professionals working in functions ranging
from technically-minded Petrophysicists and
Petroleum Engineers through to more corporate
staff in Legal, Contracting and Procurement to
Aviation and Marine specialists.
In Pursuit of Future Growth
With the support of its shareholders, BSP
is pursuing a growth agenda to enable the
company to continue powering Brunei’s future for
generations to come.
Part of this future growth journey is drawing out a
plan to unlock hydrocarbons, a collective term used
for oil and gas. A dedicated integrated team from
various functions is tasked to develop and drive
the BSP Hydrocarbon Maturation Roadmap. Their
dedication over the past few years recently gained
international recognition, as the Hydrocarbon
Maturation Roadmap team was selected as one of
the winners for the Shell Upstream Impact Awards,
from a pool of nearly 300 nominations spanning 21
countries. The award recognises the team’s efforts
in securing a sustainable future for BSP and Brunei.
Such future growth also means that BSP can
diversify its customer portfolio and will secure
future buyers of its products. Last year, BSP
signed new key commercial agreements to
supply natural gas to Brunei Fertilizer Industry
(BFI) Ammonia/Urea Plant and to provide crude
oil to Hengyi refinery, marking partnerships
with new key players in the domestic industrial
space. These partnerships further strengthen
BSP’s commercial portfolio and its reputation as
a reliable hydrocarbon supplier within the region
and beyond.
Technological Firsts
BSP’s continued success has been ensured as a
result of several “Made In Brunei” innovations,
ideas developed and implemented, many for
the first time anywhere in the world, in dozens
of fields within Brunei. BSP’s engineers have
consistently invented new drilling techniques
to access some of Brunei’s most complicated
underground reservoirs, and continued success
in this area is testament to BSP’s persistent
innovation.
When the Champion West field was discovered
in 1975, there were hundreds of small oil and
gas accumulations in thin reservoirs which
made it difficult and uneconomic to develop at
the time, leaving it to lie dormant for 25 years.
Today, Champion West is an example of BSP’s
leadership in two key technologies: “snake
wells” and “smart fields”, which have now
become an industry benchmark. The snake
well design created in 2001 by BSP provided a
solution to improve reservoir access: the well
was designed to weave to several pockets of oil
and gas that would otherwise be uneconomic
to access individually, reducing cost and
ensuring no hydrocarbon accumulations are
overlooked.
Minister at the Prime Minister’s Office and Minister of Finance and Economy II Yang Berhormat Dato
Seri Setia Dr Awang Haji Mohd Amin Liew bin Abdullah witnessed the signing ceremony between
Brunei Shell Petroleum Co Sdn Bhd, Permai Holdings and Brunei Fertilizer Industries