Based in Italy, ENI is one of the world’s largest oil companies. With a presence in about 70 countries and employing more than 70,000 people worldwide, its main business areas are exploration and production, gas and power, and refining and marketing. The complexity of the exploration and production asset portfolio is the company’s main risk concern, with platforms, pipelines and wells disseminated all over the world—onshore, offshore and subsea.

In an increasingly difficult and capacity-driven exploration and production risk scenario, like many others in its market, ENI uses a captive to purchase additional or different capacity over that provided by OIL (Oil Insurance Limited, a mutual insurance company owned and operated by the world’s major oil firms).

The initiative to streamline its risk management approach started a few years ago. According to Giancarlo Fraticelli, corporate risk manager at ENI, "For many years, we used our insurance company, Padana, to optimize risk retention and transfer to the market. However, a detailed understanding of the underlying risk exposure was sometimes missing."

Furthermore, working in such geographically diverse places as Egypt, Australia, Congo and the Gulf of Mexico presented additional challenges in terms of sharing consistent information between the groups and ensuring its accuracy. "We acknowledged that our business units across the world needed to provide more accurate risk information," Fraticelli says. "Aon RiskConsole was chosen as the starting point of a worldwide, shared procedure of capturing risk data. This way, the globally purchased risk capacity will be mirrored by a globally captured set of data."

UNDERSTANDING RISK EXPOSURE

In addition to being Web-based, the other important consideration for ENI when choosing RiskConsole was its flexibility. The complexity of ENI’s operations meant that the solution needed to record a global, comprehensive picture of exposures. "Previously, we had some difficulties in understanding our exposure properly because, in the oil and gas industry, there is a complex, four-dimensional relationship between the assets. A worksheet cannot accurately represent this multifaceted situation," says Andrea Di Caprio, head of risk portfolio analysis at ENI.

It was very costly in time and resources to gather and compare the required data. Entering and checking individual entries in worksheets with thousands of lines was a manual task and, therefore, prone to error. Now when ENI uses Aon's RiskConsole, they can register more than two dimensions in an uncomplicated and accurate format. "It is unusual for a company to have this kind of information; we were entering virgin territory," Di Caprio says.

ENI has more than 150 pipelines identified in RiskConsole by name, start and endpoint, length, diameter, whether it is oil or gas, and the water depth. To complete the picture, it links this information with the associated field, plant, platform, subsea and floating production storage offloading (FPSO) data.

Within each Aon RiskConsole asset file, it can now see what other assets are connected at the click of a button. This can be particularly useful when major events occur, such as a well blow-out and the consequences on linked platforms. "The system allows us to get an immediate, overall picture of what happened and the consequences," Di Caprio says. "RiskConsole shows all the complex relationships and keeps them in a single source."

RISK MAPPING ACCESSIBILITY

Because its activities are high risk and ENI usually explores and develops new fields in conjunction with partners, it is important to have all relevant information, such as the number of wells, footage and type of well, entered into the system. "Knowing whether a well is in its exploration or production stage, as well as whether we are drilling at 1,000 or 5,000 meters, dramatically changes the risk and the cost associated with it. We pay by the drilled foot, so knowing the cost of development is critical for us," Di Caprio says.