Journal of Petroleum Technology

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Featured this monthPermian Basin RenaissanceA renaissance in drilling activity is occurring in the Permian Basin in the southwestern United States. According to the Railroad Commission of Texas, the Texas Permian Basin rig count increased from 129 in 2005 to 355 in 2011 and the total Permian Basin rig count climbed to 500 in May 2012.

Features

Shopping for New Ideas Outside the Oil Business As oil and gas exploration and service companies face new challenges, the best solution is often achieved by adapting technologies from outside the industry. Examples of such technologies are digital solid state propulsion, fluid imaging, polymer aging concepts, special conductive coatings, and rapid high temperature heat treatment.

Management As the topic of "the cloud" has attracted much attention in recent years, several competing definitions of it have emerged. A comprehensive definition put forward by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology seeks to clarify the issue.

Young Technology Showcase The Baker Hughes MaxCOR rotary sidewall coring service provides fast, accurate 3.8-cm-diameter core samples with 213% more volume than the company’s standard PowerCOR rotary sidewall coring samples. The system improves accuracy of rock and fluid analysis and is capable of acquiring larger, higher quality samples while operating at the highest industry temperature and pressure ratings.

Unconventional Exploration Reaches Alaska’s North Slope The North Slope of Alaska has the potential to be the site of the next US shale exploration boom. Great Bear Petroleum is already drilling, and, according to the US Geological Survey, up to 2 billion bbl of oil could be produced from shale formations on the North Slope.

Guest Editorial Since the beginning of 2010, front-month gas futures prices have fallen from USD 5.60/MMBtu to their current level of USD 3.60/MMBtu. However, in light of the upside influences, Jeff Miller, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Halliburton, presents his bullish view on the long-term future of natural gas.

Technology Focus

Nanotechnology

Niall Fleming, SPE, Leading Advisor for Well Productivity and Stimulation, Statoil

Advances in nanotechnology have revolutionized many aspects of medical treatments and electronics, and huge potential exists for similar benefits to be realized in the oil industry. Operators and service companies, in cooperation with academia, are investigating the potential applications of nanotechnology and examining the scope for crossover technologies that have been developed for other industries.

Molecular-Dynamics Study Examines Effect of Nanoparticles on Oil/Water Flow Experiments on oil/water/nanoparticle flow behavior in confined clay nanochannels were conducted with molecular-dynamics simulations. Three sizes of nanochannels and different numbers of nanoparticles were considered. The results show that the pressure to drive the oil/water binary mixture through a periodic confined channel increases dramatically with the reduction of the channel size. In the absence of [...]

Nonmodified Silica Nanoparticles Decrease Water Invasion Into Atoka Shale Shales account for 75% of the all footage drilled and are responsible for 90% of wellbore-stability problems. Maintaining wellbore stability is one of the more critical aspects of oil and gas drilling. The main cause of shale instability for both soft and hard shales is water absorption and subsequent swelling and sloughing of the wellbore. [...]

Controlled-Electrolytic-Metallics Completion Devices Combine Strength With Dissolution Completion devices such as fracturing balls, disks, and plugs are often used for downhole fluid and pressure control. Current polymer material must be milled away, flowed back, or otherwise removed before production. Severe deformation of currently used materials that prevents flowback has been reported, requiring costly intervention operations to either remove or replace the tools [...]

Well Testing

Angel G. Guzmán-Garcia, SPE, Engineer Advisor, ExxonMobil Exploration Company

The times they are a-changin’, Bob Dylan sang in the mid-1960s. And it seems to be the case in our industry today. With the never-ending search for new sources of hydrocarbons in more-complex environments, the application of old technologies has not been satisfactory to help us fully realize the new exploration opportunities.

Martin Linge Extended Well Test: Field-Development Decision The Martin Linge field was discovered in the 1970s but was never developed because of uncertainties. The complex structural settings of the Brent reservoirs were the main issue: Transmissibility through numerous faults has a direct effect on the number and type of development wells required for appropriate drainage. In 2009–10, Total drilled an appraisal well [...]

Formation-Tester Pulse Testing in Tight Formations Tight-formation testing, when mobilities are lower than 0.01 md/cp, poses significant challenges because conventional pressure-transient buildup testing becomes impractical because of the long buildup-stabilization time. An automated-pulse-test method is introduced for testing tight formations. It reduces testing time significantly and makes determination of formation pressure and permeability possible. Based on pressure data during the shut-in [...]

Integrated Dynamic-Flow Analysis To Characterize an Unconventional Reservoir In November 2010, YPF brought the first shale-oil well on line in Argentina in the Loma La Lata field after fracturing the Vaca Muerta formation, the main source rock in the Neuquen basin. Production forecasting and reserves estimation in this kind of reservoir are fraught with challenges. Several reservoir- and production-analysis techniques were applied, including [...]

Offshore Facilities

Ian G. Ball, SPE, Technology Advisor, Intecsea

In last year’s Offshore Facilities Technology Focus (February 2012), we highlighted the increasingly important role that constructive collaboration plays in facilitating delivery of successful field-development outcomes in increasingly challenging environments. In this edition, we illustrate the vital importance of innovative technological advances in enabling some of these challenging field developments that would otherwise not be technically feasible.

Floating 2-MW Turbine Prototype Tests Feasibility of Harnessing Offshore Wind A 2-MW floating offshore wind system prototype was implemented off the coast of Portugal. The project was designed to prove the technical and economic feasibility of floating offshore wind turbines in southern Europe. It is based on the WindFloat concept, a three-column semisubmersible-platform design with water-entrapment plates. Such technology enables deployment of multimegawatt wind-turbine generators [...]

World’s Longest Electrically Heated Flowline Allows HP/HT Field Tieback to Existing Host The Linnorm gas/condensate field in the Norwegian Sea is technically challenging. The high-pressure/high-temperature (HP/HT) reservoir contains gas with CO2, H2S, and traces of mercury. Although the gas is relatively lean, the associated condensate has waxy properties. Although there are production facilities within 30 to 70 km, this discovery was initially seen as "stranded" gas because of [...]

High-Resolution 3D Laser Imaging Advances to Subcentimeter Precision 3D laser imaging is a powerful data-collection system that provides 3D information for a specific region of interest. Developing the technology to provide high-definition subsea laser imaging enables the deepwater industry to use the current state of the art in 3D metrology and related best practices developed for the terrestrial market. Terrestrial laser scanners commonly produce centimeter spatial and range accuracy [...]

Drilling Technology

Stéphane Menand, SPE, Managing Director, DrillScan US

When searching OnePetro for papers dealing with "real time," "drilling," and "optimization," one notices that 85% of SPE papers dealing with these three terms have been written over the last decade (2002–12). Indeed, there is an accelerated trend strongly supported by drilling companies (especially operators and service companies) of reducing nonproductive time, speeding up the learning curve, and optimizing drilling efficiency to reduce drilling cost and avoid unexpected failures.

Optimization Delivers ERD Performance Boost—Sakhalin Island Many performance-enhancement initiatives were used by the operator of the Sakhalin-I project in drilling and completing the extended-reach-drilling (ERD) program at the Odoptu field, Sakhalin Island, Russia. The initial seven-well ERD program was expanded to nine wells, including the world-record Well OP-11. The operator’s redesign philosophy to remove limiters from the drilling process resulted in [...]

Distributed-Dynamics Feasibility Study Wired drillpipe enables a variety of measurements to be taken throughout the drilling assembly. One such measurement is acceleration to better determine the way that vibration events are distributed from the bottomhole assembly (BHA) to the upper drillstring or vice versa. Potential use of distributed dynamics for real-time decision making can be investigated by use [...]

High-Confidence Vertical Positioning for Extended-Reach Wells Establishing confidence in the vertical thickness of the hydrocarbon column is critical in development-project economics. True-vertical-depth (TVD) uncertainty associated with the hydrocarbon column, in the absence of vertical-appraisal-well data, may be dominated by the propagation of inclination error in nonvertical or horizontal pilot wells. The challenges associated with establishing reliable hydrocarbon-column height can be extreme [...]

Early Symptom Detection for Downhole Conditions: Principles and Results During drilling operations, downhole conditions may deteriorate and lead to unexpected situations that can result in significant delays. In most cases, warning signs of the deterioration can be observed in advance, and proactive actions can avoid serious incidents such as packoffs or stuck pipe. A new analysis methodology that relies on an automatic real-time computer system [...]