Journal of Petroleum Technology

Home / Issues / 2012-05

Featured this monthThe Post-Macondo World: Two Years After the SpillAn examination of the oil spill’s effect on regulation, permitting, production, technology, safety, and the environment.

Features

Opportunity, Challenge Meet on Arctic Horizon The Arctic represents a large expanse of opportunity for discovery and development of oil and gas resources, but one matched equally with technical challenges that test the limits of the industry.

R&D Grand Challenges The sixth in a series of articles on the great challenges facing the oil and gas industry as outlined by the SPE Research and Development Committee.

Assessing the Magnitude and Consequences of Reservoir Souring Reservoir souring, the unplanned increase in hydrogen sulfide in produced fluids during field life, is a growing concern for the petroleum production industry.

Talent & Technology Managers and the rank and file may disagree on whose career takes precedence in a dual career couple.

Management A look at the progress being made toward real-time drilling operations with drilling center support.

Drillers Find Themselves in a Tricky Spot at the Human/Machine Interface The pressure to do things better, faster, and more safely using computerized tools is creating complex management challenges.

Guest Editorial Steve Roberts, vice president of the Field of the Future for BP, ponders the next steps for the digital oil field.

Technology Focus

Well Construction

Bob Carpenter, SPE, Research Consultant, Chevron Exploration and Technology Company

The number and economic contribution of unconventional (tight gas/shale and steamflood) wells continued to increase rapidly in 2011, as did the participation of major operators. That increased industry focus was evident again in the distribution of papers. Also, there were more papers relating advances in plug-and-abandonment, Arctic, high-pressure/high-temperature (HP/HT), and carbon-capture technologies.

More-Effective Plug-and-Abandonment Cementing Technique The effectiveness of a permanent abandonment plug is measured by its ability to bridge the wellbore cross section, both vertically and horizontally, including all annuli, with a plugging medium that can withstand the harsh environment to which it is exposed (Fig. 1). A new method is presented that creates a permanent abandonment plug by use [...]

Cemented-Liner- vs. Openhole-Packer- Completed Tight Gas Horizontal Wells With the introduction of multiple-fractured horizontal-well (MFHW) technologies and with a much better definition of the geology, a large unconventional-resource play has developed in the Glauconitic formation in central Alberta, Canada, which could contain in excess of 5 Tcf of gas in place plus associated natural-gas liquid. Microseismic technology was used in a pilot project [...]

Extreme-Environment Cementing in the Schoonebeek Heavy-Oil Field The Schoonebeek heavy-oil field was first developed by Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij B.V. in the late 1940s. Because of economics, it was abandoned in 1996. In 2008, the Schoonebeek Redevelopment Project, using a gravity-assisted-steamflood (GASF) design concept, was initiated with 73 wells (44 producers, 25 injectors, and four observation wells). A key design requirement was long-term [...]

Intelligent Fields Technology

John Hudson, SPE, Senior Production Engineer, Shell

As an industry, we clearly have moved beyond the heady first years of the digital transformation, where the anticipation from many was that within a few years we would have a consolidated software solution spanning the scope of E&P workflows. While the stories told by such a panel naturally focused more on success cases (particularly for large greenfield applications), what emerges is evidence of large-scale benefits when a company invests in repeating successful patterns at its scale of operation—this is found to be true for both operators and service companies.

Real-Time Optimization of a Highly Complex, Integrated Gas System Real-time optimization (RTO) was used by Shell Malaysia E&P on the integrated gas-production system in Sarawak. Models for real-time monitoring and optimization of wells and facilities were implemented on a gas-production network spanning more than 100 wells on more than 40 platforms across several production-sharing contracts (PSCs). Digital technology enabled field-based data to be used [...]

Intelligent-Field-Infrastructure Adoption: Approach and Best Practices The drive toward implementing an intelligent-field infrastructure (IFI) is a continuous aim for operators. It requires the correct balance between technology, business drivers, and evolving implementation requirements. Successful implementation relies on a robust real-time field-to-desktop data-acquisition and -delivery system designed with clearly defined data-acquisition requirements. The challenge in achieving such an objective is made more [...]

Closed-Loop Feedback Control for Production Optimization Most optimization methods are model based and are effective only if the model or ensemble of models used in the optimization captures all possible reservoir behaviors at the individual well and at the completion level. Closed-loop control based on direct feedback between reservoir monitoring and inflow-valve settings can yield close-to-optimal gains in net present value [...]

Multilateral / Extended Reach

Alvaro Felippe Negrão, SPE, Senior Advisor, Woodside Energy USA

Our industry has been involved in incidents that demonstrated the need of a new approach for evaluating and mitigating the risks in well construction. The "what’s worked well in the past" conservative approach is not possible anymore, in face of the damaged trust of the public about upstream activity. Though the criticism soars against exploration and production activities, the industry has allocated substantial investments in research for new technologies aimed to preclude risk events of recent years. New procedures and technologies, in addition to existing ones, will be deployed in the near future to eliminate blowouts or underground contamination from upstream operations.

Pushing the Extended-Reach Envelope: Drilling a Record-Reach Well Extended-reach drilling (ERD) has become a common means to access reserves economically from existing infrastructure, provide access to reserves that were previously out of reach, and reduce the environmental footprint of drilling and production facilities. ExxonMobil, as operator for the Sakhalin 1 project, recently completed drilling operations at the Odoptu field, located offshore Sakhalin Island, Russia. The Odoptu development drilled [...]

Hybrid System Brings Flexibility of CT to Long, Extended-Reach Wells The number of long extended-reach wells being drilled in the oil and gas industry continues to increase. These wells present complex challenges in completion and intervention procedures because operators demand the same level of performance achieved on shallower wells while providing a cost-effective and safe solution. To reach deep target depths with coiled tubing (CT), smaller coil must be [...]

A Successful World-Record Installation of Multilateral Technology in the North Sea Over the last decade, multilateral technology (MLT) has been widely used on several of Statoil’s licenses. In October 2010, the deepest-set sealed multilateral junction in the industry was installed at 6900-m measured depth (MD) in Oseberg South Well 30/9-F-9 AY tIY2. The main bore was drilled to total depth (TD) at 8583 m MD, and [...]

Deepwater Projects

Jacques Braile Saliés, SPE, Drilling Manager, Queiroz Galvão E&P

No word defines deepwater projects better than "innovation," and on 25 February 2012, one of the most innovative field-development projects came on stream: Cascade and Chinook (C&C) in the US Gulf of Mexico (GOM). One well is producing from Cascade to the first floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel in the US GOM. The project brings several firsts and innovations that will be available to the entire oil industry in the near future.

Overcoming Black Sea Ultradeepwater Drilling Challenges A well-management process that includes design methodology and well-execution procedures was used by Petrobras to drill its first ultradeepwater well in a remote and challenging area of the Turkish waters in the Black Sea (Fig. 1). Ranked as a well of the highest complexity level, this wildcat deepwater well faced a number of expected hazards, [...]

Efficient Perforation of High-Pressure Deepwater Wells Thousands of perforating jobs are conducted successfully worldwide each month. However, for a small number of jobs, typically high-pressure deepwater wells, gun shock is a real and significant risk. The Cascade and Chinook projects presented the two largest deepwater high-pressure perforation jobs to date in the Gulf of Mexico (Fig. 1). These Lower Tertiary well [...]

New Approach to Deepwater-Drilling-Data Analysis Enhances Real-Time Capabilities Deepwater drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico is no longer a given in the aftermath of the BP Macondo blowout. The new and ever-evolving process to apply for drilling permits and operate now greatly depends on thorough real-time monitoring of pertinent surface and downhole data. A new method for loading and analyzing live time [...]