Journal of Petroleum Technology

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Featured this monthData From Above: The Advantages of Unmanned AircraftUnmanned aircraft are finding their place in the oil and gas industry by providing aerial geologic modeling to address reservoir-related challenges and making inspections safer.

Features

Middle East-North Africa Region Readies for Shale Revolution Oil-rich but gas-short countries in the Middle East-north Africa region are exploring unconventional resources, particularly for shale and tight gas, and assessing their potential for long-term growth.

SPE Bestows 2013 International Awards at Annual Meeting Members who made outstanding contributions to SPE and the petroleum industry will receive special distinction at the 2013 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition.

Selling New Proppant Demands Focus on the Old Bottom Line Oxane Materials’ advanced ceramic proppant travels farther during fracturing in larger quantities, thereby leading to smoother, higher flows of oil and gas.

Q&A – Rod MacGregor The chief executive talks about the technologies used, challenges, and key lessons learned from the Middle East’s first thermal enhanced oil-recovery project in Oman.

Guest Editorial Digital oilfield solutions can be leveraged as a whole to provide aggregate value at the business portfolio or corporate strategy levels and to contribute to a company’s intellectual capital.

Management: Addressing Gaps in Water Treatment Technology The rise in production through unconventional methods and enhanced oil recovery has identified shortcomings in current water-treatment technology.

New Uses Keep Emerging for A Deceptively Simple Pump The rapid growth of progressing cavity pumps is an example of how new uses continue to emerge for older technology.

Talent & Technology: The Elements of a Soft Competency Matrix In response to the need for emotional intelligence and soft skills, the SPE Soft Skills Council proposes a competency matrix as a tool to identify skills gaps at various stages of one’s career.

Technology Focus

Data Management and Communication

Luigi Saputelli, SPE, Petroleum Engineer

The questions addressed in this feature are: What does the petroleum industry need to do to catch up on the generational breach, and how will the oil industry enhance the current training schemes to serve business needs?

Hands-On Teaching for Petroleum Engineers in the Twenty-First Century Several years ago, a new concept of teaching undergraduate and graduate students was introduced at the Clausthal University of Technology (CUT) based on the implementation of hands-on teaching systems that not only expose the students to physical models but also require them to build such models or to generate experiments using existing models. The results [...]

Reducing Time to Autonomy for Technical Staff Meeting increased production targets in the near future will require the recruitment and development of a large technical staff, made up of both recent graduates and experienced professionals. Shortening time to autonomy and integration is critical to success. This paper describes Royal Dutch Shell’s approach to developing this pipeline of technical professionals by outlining the [...]

Technical Master Class: A New Approach to Knowledge Transfer Technical master classes (TMCs) are a new training concept designed to accelerate building expertise among geoscience, engineering, and commercial professionals. The ExxonMobil TMC concept emphasizes transferring knowledge from experts to practitioners through a training process that blends mentoring and traditional technical training. Rather than teaching only the factual knowledge and technical concepts that dominate traditional [...]

Tight Reservoirs

Gregory Kubala, SPE, Chemistry Métier Manager, Schlumberger Pressure Pumping and Chemistry

Tight reservoirs are still in the early stages of becoming a dominant source of energy and economic growth throughout the world for years to come. I recently read two distinctly different articles particularly relevant to tight reservoirs.

Optic Imaging of Two-Phase-Flow Behavior in Nanoscale Fractures Gas in tight sand and shale exists in underground reservoirs with microdarcy or even nanodarcy permeability ranges; these reservoirs are characterized by small pore throats and crack-like interconnections between pores. The physics of fluid flow in these rocks, with measured permeability in the nanodarcy range, is poorly understood. Knowing the fluid-flow behavior in the nanoscale [...]

Shale Development Plan Blends Fracture, Reservoir, and Geomechanics Modeling A multidisciplinary approach integrates fracture characteristics, reservoir production, and stress-field evolution to design and optimize the development of unconventional assets. In this approach, fracture modeling and advanced rate-transient techniques are used to constrain fracture geometry and depletion characteristics of existing wells. This knowledge is used in finite-element geomechanical modeling to predict fracture orientation in nearby wells. [...]

Fracturing-Treatment Design and Reservoir Properties Impact Shale-Gas Production This paper sheds light on the nonlinear physics involved in the production of shale-gas reservoirs by improving the understanding of the complex relation between gas production, reservoir properties, and several treatment-design parameters. The authors ran 28 simulations to cover the 2D parametric space of proppant size and fracturing-fluid viscosity for a range of parameters (detailed [...]

Sand Management and Frac Pack

Mohammed Azeemuddin, SPE, Technical Team Lead, Geomechanics and Pore Pressure Prediction Group at Chevron Energy Technology Company

Sand production is an unintended consequence of oil and gas production from unconsolidated and semi-consolidated reservoirs, causing damage to surface and subsurface well equipment and reducing the hydrocarbon productivity.

Facilities Sand-Management Techniques Fall Into Two Types: Inclusionary and Exclusionary Traditionally, sand-control equipment is used to prevent sand from entering the wellbore. This technique can be termed "exclusionary." An alternative is to produce solids with the well fluids and separate them at the surface. This technique is termed "inclusionary" because the solids freely flow with the fluids to the surface. Exclusionary techniques protect production tubulars, [...]

Nondestructive Core-Strength Tester Uses Steel Ball To Evaluate Hardness This paper presents results from a nondestructive core-strength-index tester that is less destructive than the Schmidt hammer and less intrusive, easier, faster, and less expensive than the core scratch tester. The portable hardness-index tester measures and compares the impact and rebound velocities of a small steel ball after its collision with a rock surface to [...]

Benchmark Helps Select Best Technique for Sand Control in Field Development This paper shares the engineering approach used to determine where and when sand control was needed in offshore Malaysia on the basis of geomechanical sand-free critical-drawdown-pressure (CDP) evaluation for the selected well type, configuration, and completion. The decision to implement a proper method of sand control can be made by comparing the CDP with the [...]

Field Development Projects

Mauricio Pestana Rebelo, SPE, Technical Services Manager, Petrobras America for the Gulf

The oil industry is moving every day to new frontiers to find and produce oil. The development of new fields is bringing different challenges. Several of these new frontier projects require the use of new technologies, thus further challenging project teams.

Optimized Shale-Resource Development: Well Placement and Hydraulic-Fracture Stages Europe and Australia have joined the US in expanding recoverable hydrocarbons from unconventional resources, and initial activities are on the rise elsewhere. However, not all wells are producing commercially, and not all hydraulic-fracture stages contribute within the producing wells, suggesting that it is important to target the field’s sweet spots when dealing with shale resources. Therefore, [...]

Drilling and Completing Cascade and Chinook Wells: A Case History During the design, implementation, and operation of the Cascade and Chinook (C&C) field development project in ultradeep water in the Lower Tertiary play of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), the technical limits of single-trip multizone (STMZ) frac-pack systems were pushed to depths greater than 27,000 ft using high fracture rates and high-strength proppants; knowledge was [...]

Developing Flank Areas in a Giant Carbonate Field With Horizontal-Well Placement Successful development of flank areas depends on accurate reservoir characterization—in particular, water-saturation distribution—in addition to the optimal areal and vertical placement of wells. In relatively thin reservoirs, horizontal wells are generally preferred to increase reservoir contact; the proper spacing and vertical placement of these wells are critical. To test the initial concept in the field, [...]