Journal of Petroleum Technology

Home / Issues / 2013-03

Featured this monthCutting the Cables on WirelessThe days when seismic surveys require long, orange cables snaking across the landscape may be numbered as battery-powered solo units offer an alternative in extreme environments.

Features

Exploring Deep Earth and Deep Space: What Role Does the Petroleum Industry Play? Researchers investigating deep Earth and deep space yield insight into a possible vast hydrocarbon presence. How does this affect the ongoing quest to keep the commercial flow of oil and gas going deep into the future?

Extracting Profits From Abu Dhabi’s Sour Gas An increase in local gas consumption in the United Arab Emirates has compelled the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to step up the development of its sour gas fields, one of the most challenging types of fields for oil companies.

Young Technology Showcase Silixa’s intelligent Distributed Acoustic Sensor (iDAS) offers a solution for permanent and continuous downhole monitoring and reservoir monitoring by overcoming the cost and technology challenges encountered with traditional sensor placement.

Guest Editorial Roland Moreau of ExxonMobil Upstream Research discusses how Health, Safety, Security, Environment, and Social Responsibility is becoming a more prominent factor in our industry.

Talent & Technology Employees place great emphasis on training and development opportunities when choosing employers, and lack of training and skills development could hamper the oil and gas industry’s short-term potential for production growth.

Challenges, Opportunities Abound for Artificial Lift Artificial lift is one of the most widely used oil and gas production technologies, and its use is likely to expand with the industry’s push into unconventional resources and deepwater projects.

Q&A – Ali Vezvaei, Siemens Middle East Vezvaei, executive vice president and general manager of Division Oil and Gas at Siemens Middle East, talks about the company’s involvement in the Habshan-Fujairah crude pipeline project in the United Arab Emirates.

Technology Focus

Hydraulic Fracturing

Karen Olson, SPE, Completion Engineering Chief, Southwestern Energy

Whoever thought the "drilling process" of "fracking" would be making headlines? In a tour of hydraulic-fracturing operations, ironically in a fossil-fuel-powered vehicle, Yoko Ono was trying to draw attention to the horrors of the process. Of course, no one on the tour actually lived there, owns property there, or has a degree in hydrology, geology, or petroleum engineering.

Optimizing Fracture Stimulations in Low-Permeability Oil Reservoirs in the Ordos Basin Huge low-permeability oil reserves are found in the Ordos basin in China. Key characteristics are low reservoir quality (10 to 13% porosity), low permeability (0.3 to 2.0 md), and low reservoir pressures (pressure gradients of 0.0075 to 0.009 MPa/m). Fracture stimulation is essential for commercial production in these reservoirs. To understand fracture-growth behavior better and [...]

Integrated Microseismic Monitoring for Field Optimization—Marcellus Shale This work focused on integrative analysis of hydraulic-fracture treatments conducted in the Marcellus shale. The treatments were monitored by a permanently installed array of buried geophones used to detect microseismic events. Analysis of stress changes indicated by the microseismic-source mechanisms was used to explain the asymmetry of microseismicity about the wellbore. Simple well-test simulations were [...]

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: Creating Hydraulic-Fracture Complexity in the Bakken Drilling the Bakken in North Dakota has increased dramatically over the past several years as operators sought to hold acreage and create value with the drill bit. Much of this activity has been in the central-basin portion of the Williston basin where wells drilled before 2008 were uneconomic. Advances in completion technology caused a fundamental [...]

Effect of Cemented Natural Fractures on Hydraulic-Fracture Propagation Microseismic data and coring studies suggest that hydraulic fractures interact heavily with natural fractures, creating complex fracture networks in naturally fractured reservoirs such as the Barnett shale, Eagle Ford shale, and Marcellus shale. Because direct observations of subsurface hydraulic-fracture geometries are incomplete or nonexistent, properly scaled experimental research and computer modeling based on realistic assumptions [...]

Production Operations

Francisco J.S. Alhanati, Managing Director, C-FER Technologies

Production engineers are often tasked with analyzing existing data to try to understand the factors affecting equipment failures or subpar performance, to guide the implementation of actions geared toward mitigating such problems and improving overall operations. Sometimes, this can become quite a difficult task.

New Test Methods Examine Why Downhole Chemical Injection Lines Fail Downhole continuous injection of chemicals mainly involves injection of scale inhibitor (SI), where the objective is to protect the upper tubing and downhole safety valve (DHSV) from (Ba/Sr)SO4 or CaCO3 scale. Designing, operating, and maintaining the chemical injection lines demand extra focus on several topics, such as material selection, chemical qualification, and monitoring. Pressure, temperature, [...]

Distributed-Temperature-Sensing Method Detects Wax and Optimizes Treatment Distributed temperature sensing (DTS) has been commercially available for more than a decade; however, only recently has it been used in the oil industry. Interpretation of the data has been difficult, and, therefore, its value has been questioned. The author presents an original technique of monitoring wax buildup through the use of the DTS data. [...]

Identification and Prediction of Wells Susceptible to Sulfide Stress Cracking Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) generated by aquathermolysis—a high-temperature reaction of condensed steam (water) with sulfur-bearing bitumen in the reservoir rock—may increase the risk of sulfide stress cracking (SSC) in cyclic-steam-stimulation (CSS) wells. Identifying the SSC-susceptible wells is important in terms of reducing SSC risk by allocating resources to and implementing proactive intervention measures at the SSC-susceptible [...]

Seismic Applications

Gerd Kleemeyer, SPE, Manager of Integrated Geophysical Services, Shell, Global Solutions Upstream

The advanced seismic technologies available today require timely planning and close integration to maximize their value. This requirement has been a red thread in all my previous feature reviews, and this is likely to continue.

Measurements of Hydraulic-Fracture-Induced Seismicity in Gas Shales Hydraulic fracturing is essential for hydrocarbon extraction from both conventional and unconventional reservoirs. Recently, concern has developed regarding induced seismicity generated in association with multistage fracturing of horizontal wells in shale reservoirs. A review of thousands of fracture treatments that have been monitored microseismically shows that the induced seismicity associated with hydraulic fracturing is very [...]

Carbonate-Reservoir Characterization: Wide-Azimuth-Seismic Processing This seismic study was performed on a seismic acquisition over a carbonate field in the UAE. One challenge was to reprocess these data ensuring that the azimuthal information was preserved properly all along the sequence. An additional challenge was related to the very shallow water environment that added complexity such as dispersive ground roll and water-layer-related [...]

Broadband Seismic: Ultimate Input for Quantitative Seismic Interpretation Predicting reservoir properties away from the well using seismic information is key to quantitative interpretation. Quantitative seismic interpretation combines well and seismic data with seismic interpretation or early geological information. This proposed workflow is integrated, and the quality and accuracy of individual constituents are highly important to estimate the volume of hydrocarbon in place in [...]

Heavy Oil

Cam Matthews, SPE, C-FER Technologies Fellow

With continued favorable oil prices, it has been another busy year in terms of heavy-oil discoveries and field developments throughout the world. Both onshore and offshore, many of these new projects are of major scale, requiring significant investment and ranking high in terms of complexity and challenge from a development and recovery standpoint.

Experiments Examine Shear-Enhanced Two-Phase Flow in Athabasca Sands Field results in steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) heavy-oil operations suggest formation permeability changes during production operations. This process was investigated using samples constructed from loose Athabasca sand. Results indicate that permeability changes and endpoint oil- and water-saturation variation are a function of loading boundary conditions. Overall, laboratory experiment results support increased permeability from steam [...]

Tests Investigate Recovery Mechanisms of Steam Injection in Carbonate Reservoir Steam injection in carbonate heavy-oil reservoirs is a complex process. The main challenge is that the injected steam breaks through from a fracture network, resulting in poor sweep efficiency. A large amount of oil remains behind the steam front. In addition, severe mineral dissolution (or precipitation) because of steam/brine/rock interaction at high temperatures has a [...]

Reservoir Management for World’s First Thermal Gas/Oil Gravity-Drainage Project The world’s first full-field thermally assisted gas/oil gravity-drainage (TAGOGD) project has begun in Oman (The field in Oman, showing the top structure, main faults, and wells drilled. Well colors: blue=aquifer pump off; red=producer; green=steam injector; purple=gradio-temperature observation wells; yellow=temperature observation wells; black=microseismic observation wells; gray=abandoned wells. Wells not shown include water supply and disposal and [...]