Journal of Petroleum Technology

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Featured this monthMature Fields Hold Big Expansion OpportunityWhile big discoveries and major new developments deservedly grab the headlines, mature fields are the backbone of global oil and gas production.

Features

Data Mining Applications in the Oil and Gas Industry The integration of data analytics into the practice of petroleum engineering is essential in establishing a way for the industry to effectively evaluate huge amounts of data.

Management Since the discovery of the giant Tupi-Lula pre-salt complex in the Santos Basin of Brazil, explorers have been integrating new seismic technology advances with the fundamentals of regional basin geology to extend the pre-salt play across the Atlantic margin to the west coast of Africa.

SPE Honors 2012 Awards Recipients at Annual Meeting Winners of SPE’s annual technical and professional awards.

Middle East Attacks Raise Cyber Security Questions Cyber attacks on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s RasGas are forcing Middle East firms to heighten computer system security.

Reduced-Emission Completions Improve Safety, Decrease Footprint By 2015, every hydraulically fractured well in the US will be required to use a "green" completion to capture and measure all oil and gas released during the flowback and drillout phases.

Increased Oil Production With Something Old, Something New Chemical-based EOR is a re-emerging technology with a new generation of tools under development. Now researchers are tapping into advances in materials sciences to find ways to push the production threshold further.

Young Technology Showcase Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center has developed a mobile robot to safely and cost-effectively inspect and monitor hazardous and remote production facilities.

Guest Editorial Vikram Rao, executive director of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium, examines the hyperbole surrounding hydraulic fracturing.

Discussion/Reply A discussion of the paper SPE 152257 "Advances in Measuring Permeability Address Shortcomings of Crushed-Rock Technique."

Legion of Honor Recognizing 50 years of consecutive membership in SPE.

Technology Focus

Sand Management and Frac Pack

Mohammed Azeemuddin, SPE, Research Scientist-Rock Mechanics, Chevron

Production from challenging environments is fast becoming the norm for the oil and gas industry. We increasingly drill long horizontal sections in high-pressure/high-temperature reservoirs, deep and ultradeep water, and unconsolidated, depleted, and narrow-margin fields.

Optimizing Frac-Pack Completions in Multilayer and Low-Stress-Contrast Zones The deepwater Usan field, approximately 100 km south of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, has multiple oil-bearing turbidite sands of varying thickness and permeabilities that are separated by massive and thin shale intervals, making the selection of completion intervals difficult. Fracture-height confinement is challenging because of the small stress contrast between the sand bodies and the bounding [...]

Ultralightweight Proppants for Long Horizontal Gravel Packs Operators developing and producing reservoirs with deepwater and ultradeepwater wells are pushing technical limits with horizontal extension. Deepwater wells completed in unconsolidated formations usually have low fracture gradients, severe-leakoff zones, or significant washouts. Long horizontal open holes may become technically difficult or economically unfeasible to gravel pack by use of conventional fluids and gravels. Use [...]

Sanding Prediction Validated by a Perforated Test in a Sandstone Sand production from a perforated sample was determined by the onset of a significant discrepancy between strains in orthogonal directions. The onset was analyzed with three sanding models—shear-failure, cohesive-tensile-failure, and effective-plastic-strain (EPS) models. The EPS model provided results closest to testing. Equivalent plastic displacement (EPD) is proposed as an additional critical parameter that enables determining [...]

Knowledge Management and Training

Luigi Saputelli, SPE, Principal Consultant, Frontender Corporation

Although online communities, global connectivity, knowledge management, and computing power attempt to provide a platform for innovation, we may still fail to generate fast-enough answers.

Multiagent Systems Provide Support for Asset-Management Workflow Automation Asset-management workflow automation poses challenges because these workflows are multidisciplinary, cross functional, and expertise intensive. Advancements in the fields of artificial intelligence, software engineering, and decision sciences have led to the development of multiagent systems (MASs). Each agent functions as an entity of a distributed computing system, performing a broad range of tasks that may [...]

National Oil Company Works to Shift Management Toward Digital Culture The Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) introduced a digital culture within its management and professional organization. The drivers were many, mostly emanating from the concerns for enhancing production of greenfields, arresting production decline in mature reservoirs, minimizing workovers, enhancing health and safety issues with oilfield operations, and reducing decision-cycle time by effective professional engagement of subject-matter [...]

Maturing Collaboration Can Accelerate and Provide Support for Intelligent Energy Collaboration is a cornerstone of many successful intelligent-energy (IE) programs; however, as an industry, we are still in the early stages on the journey of where collaboration and IE could take us. The results from 24 IE assessments across different companies and assets point to collaboration as the most commonly recommended opportunity area for inclusion [...]

Tight Reservoirs

Gregory Kubala, SPE, Chemistry Métier Manager, Schlumberger

A noteworthy driver for technology change is environmental-footprint reduction. Proppant-placement technologies now provide production enhancement with reduction in sand and water consumption. Other technologies are enabling the reuse of produced and flowback waters.

Improving Horizontal Completions in Heterogeneous Tight Shales Production from nanodarcy-range-permeability shale formations requires extensive hydraulic fracturing, large volumes of water, and closely spaced wells. Comparing calculations of the possible fracture-surface area created during treatments to production results indicates that a large portion of that surface area is ineffective for production, resulting in ineffective use of resources. A fundamental understanding is required to [...]

Slow Fault Slip During Hydraulic-Fracturing Stimulation of Shale-Gas Reservoirs Slow slip of pre-existing fractures and faults is an important deformation mechanism that contributes to the effectiveness of slickwater hydraulic fracturing for stimulating production in extremely-low-permeability shale-gas reservoirs. Experiments indicated that slippage of faults in shales that contain less than approximately 30% clay is expected to propagate unstably, thus generating conventional microseismic events. In contrast, [...]

Improve Unconventional-Reservoir Completion and Stimulation Effectiveness In unconventional reservoirs, project success is driven by the completion. Most shale wells have long horizontal wellbores completed with cemented or uncemented casing strings. Economical wells require large hydraulic-fracture treatments in multiple stages along the lateral. Several areas are critical for a successful completion, including casing size and pressure rating, wellhead selection, treatment design, perforation [...]

Field Development Projects

Mauricio Pestana Rebelo, SPE, Technical Services Manager, Petrobras America

During the past years, several discoveries have been made in deep and ultradeep waters around the world. Many development projects are ongoing, and exploratory campaigns are increasing in this type of play. This latter factor will certainly result in new discoveries; it has already been seen in the presalt in Brazil, the Lower Tertiary in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, and the fields off the coast of West Africa.

Infrastructure Sharing Creates Value for Brazilian Deepwater Offshore Assets Investments in infrastructure for deepwater production require a significant scale for achieving minimum economic returns. The infrastructure is normally planned to accomodate the peak production, and many of the assets may not be recovered or reused. Therefore, a significant spare capacity may arise in such assets. The use of spare capacity by other fields is [...]

Offshore Ghana’s Jubilee Project Finds Success With Cooperation and Rapid Development The Jubilee project was an ambitious challenge for the first significant development offshore Ghana. The joint venture used a split operatorship to execute a world-class deepwater project in an area with no existing infrastructure in less than 3 years from the start of concept selection. Despite several significant technical and commercial hurdles, the project achieved [...]

Early-Life Field-Development Optimization of a Complex Deepwater Gulf of Mexico Field A complex deepwater Gulf of Mexico field contains several stacked hydrocarbon-bearing intervals charged with volatile oil or rich gas condensate. Well locations, drilling schedule, and reservoir units into which wells will be initially completed and then later recompleted were optimized, maximizing net present value (NPV) while matching field-development constraints. Potential well locations and recompletion locations [...]