'Heat, Light, and Mobility for a Changing World': BP Alaska sets sights on another 40 years in Prudhoe Bay.

• Position: CORPORATE 100 SPECILA SECTION / BP ALASKA

In 2017 BP Alaska celebrated forty years of operations at Prudhoe Bay, which over the last forty-plus years has produced 13 billion barrels of oil. "We're trying to go for forty more," says BP Alaska President Janet Weiss. "We can't get there by doing what we used to do."

To that end, as of a late-February interview, BP Alaska had completed 40 percent of a 3D seismic program on the North Slope, "one of the neatest things that I've seen in a few years," Weiss says. The seismic survey, which should be completed this month, encompasses 455 square miles, the largest of its kind performed by BP Alaska in Prudhoe Bay. "We're doing that in a forty-two-year-old field, which is fantastic. We did a smaller shoot at the North End of Prudhoe a few years ago, and it was so valuable, so beneficial, that we wanted to do the entire field."

Collecting this data allows BP Alaska to identify pockets of oil that were bypassed earlier "and help really sustain a longer-term drilling program." The second part of that long-term equation is having the right equipment--operating at the right price--to get at the oil.

"I'm extremely excited about two rigs that are up and running at Prudhoe Bay; they're running with our costs really reduced so that we can go after those smaller targets that are out there," Weiss says.

Reducing the cost of running an oil rig is no small feat. In order to accomplish it, BP Alaska went through a multi-phase process, including identifying potential areas of cost savings, running those identified areas through an ideation process, and then, one-by-one, dismissing or adopting those ideas.

For example, the company looked at how to plan wells in a fraction of the time, as well as understanding the causes behind poor well outcomes to avoid those in the future.

"So there were a lot of little things that made up these big cost reductions," Weiss says.

And BP Alaska's focus on efficiency has been ongoing for years.

According to the company, from 2015 to 2017, "BP Alaska improved its operating efficiency from 80 percent to upwards of 85 percent. That represents an additional 10,000 to 15,000 barrels of oil flowing through the Alaska pipeline every day--the equivalent of adding a whole new field within Prudhoe Bay."

New tech directly tied to oil production and related to oilfield operations has also enabled BP Alaska to improve efficiencies and reduce costs.

"When you think about the extensive infrastructure that we have on the North Slope and the...