Journal of Petroleum Technology

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Featured this monthDrilling in Extreme Environments: Space Drilling and the Oil and Gas IndustryDrilling in extreme environments is helping drive advances in the oil and gas industry and presents analogs that can be mined for insight.

Features

Dry Tree Semisubmersibles: The Next Deepwater Option Offshore engineering companies are taking existing technologies and lessons learned from floating rigs to create a new platform design that will allow drilling in deeper waters.

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

Management: Top Trends in the Oil and Gas Sector Deloitte’s fourth annual Oil & Gas Reality Check presents five trends affecting the oil and gas industry globally and discusses the direction these trends may follow.

E&P Software: The Next Generation New ventures supported by Surge Accelerator, a company that offers financial support, training, and advice from mentors, are creating software to improve oil and gas operations.

SPE Strategic Plan Identifies Four Priorities The new 5-year Strategic Framework will prioritize capability development, knowledge transfer, professionalism and social responsibility, and public education about the profession and industry issues.

2014 SPE President Jeff Spath The incoming SPE president shares his goals and strategy with SPE and its members for the coming year.

Industry/Research Collaboration Advances Oil and Gas Technologies Universities are working on some of the oil and gas industry’s most challenging hurdles to develop new technologies and techniques to meet the increasing global demand for energy.

Saudi Aramco Oil and Gas Production Hits Historic Levels The discovery of additional unconventional resources, new oil recovery techniques, and more university collaborations have led to Saudi Aramco’s record performance and increased technical capabilities.

Guest Editorial The oil and gas industry can enhance safety practices by developing shared guidelines for work control, isolation standards, risk assessment, and safety observation programs.

Technology Focus

Drilling Management and Automation

J.C. Cunha, SPE, is drilling manager for Ecopetrol America in Houston.

Recently, while preparing to present a seminar on deepwater-well-construction optimization, I tried hard to find a word or a phrase that could be seen as "the secret" for a safe and optimized drilling performance.

Management Strategies Optimize Drilling and Completion Operations By 2010, all applicable drilling solutions had seemingly been applied to the Castilla field in Colombia. But new problems were identified, and a model of management strategies was implemented to reduce drilling and completion timing. During the resulting optimization process, the Castilla field became the model for the rest of the fields in the company [...]

Real-Time Analysis for Remote Operations Centers Drilling, completion, production, and general surveillance are all areas that benefit greatly from remote real-time analysis. However, several challenges to remote services exist, including communications issues, fear of job loss, and working outside one’s comfort zone. What is considered an important development goal for a business might be regarded as a threat to an individual, [...]

Design of an Automated Drilling-Prediction System Data-mining processes are fundamental in obtaining the predictive benefits of real-time systems and have been progressing from descriptive to predictive optimization methods. These methods are enhanced by real-time and historic data. Advanced sensor technologies, improved data-quality control, wellsite information-transfer standard-markup-language (WITSML) data advantages, and virtual real-time drilling-optimization concepts have been assimilated into the design and implementation [...]

Integrated-Technology Approach Enables Successful Prospect Evaluations in Malaysia The central Luconia gas province located offshore Sarawak houses numerous carbonate reservoirs (Area of operations.). Some of these reservoirs are characterized by the presence of karsts and fractures, contributing to total mud losses. Implementing the variant of managed-pressure-drilling technology called pressurized mud-cap drilling (PMCD) allowed targeted total depths (TDs) to be reached on several wells. [...]

Completions Today

Paul Cameron, SPE, is a senior well-engineering adviser in the Global Wells Organization at BP.

Achieve more with less. This is the rallying cry as our global energy journey plays out, whether in the onshore shale developments, in the deepwater basins, or in the frozen lands and waters of the Arctic.

Advancements in Completion Technology Increase Production in the Williston Basin Over the years, hybrid systems have been installed in horizontal wellbores to increase the number of compartmental sections for hydraulic fracturing because of the limitations of ball-actuated fracture sleeves. Experimenting with hybrid systems provides operators with the ability to optimize spacing of fracture stages along the horizontal section when sleeve technology alone does not allow [...]

Evaluation of Established Cleanup Models in Dynamic Underbalanced Perforating Dynamic underbalanced (DUB) perforating is a process that creates a negative pressure differential, or underbalance, causing fluid to move toward the wellbore even in an initial overbalanced static condition. A DUB condition can be controlled by understanding and carefully managing the temporal pressure transients by use of multiple methods within the wellbore during and after [...]

Intelligent-Well Completion in the Troll Field Enables Feed-Through Zonal Isolation Statoil, operating the Troll field in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, wished to run a deep sidetrack from the main bore in a multilateral well that would exit through the liner in the reservoir. Several zonal-isolation methods had been evaluated, but on the basis of previous experience Statoil decided to use swellable-packer technology. [...]

North American Completion Technologies Unlock the Amin Tight Gas Formation The careful planning and successful execution of a multistage-fracture-stimulation completion in one of the first horizontal wells (KZN-F) drilled in the Amin formation in north central Oman instigated a step change in initial production rate and long-term deliverability from this tight-gas-sandstone reservoir. The operator and service company worked as a team, modeling the fracturing program [...]

Reservoir Performance and Monitoring

Erik Vikane, SPE, Production Manager, Statoil Oseberg East

"All models are wrong, but some are useful." This famous quote by George E.P. Box illustrates both the challenge and the appreciation of building models. Models are needed to predict future performance of an oil or gas field, but, at the same time, models are often biased and inaccurate.

Distributed Microchip System Records Subsurface Temperature and Pressure A microchip system capable of measuring temperature and pressure over the entire wellbore was developed and tested in the field. When used in the field, tracers will be injected together with the drilling fluid. As the tracer travels through the wellbore, it will measure the temperature and pressure throughout the wellbore and store the data [...]

Conformance Control and Proactive Reservoir Management Improve Deepwater Production The K field is one of the more developed deepwater fields currently going through development in Malaysia. It has an excellent data set from which to optimize future development activities. In hindsight, it is clear that much more complexity exists than initially thought. As a result, uncertainty does not necessarily diminish at the start of [...]

Instilling Realism in Production Forecasting Decreases Chances of Underperformance Across the exploration-and-production (E&P) industry, several projects were found to underperform compared to the promises made at the time of project approval. Investment decisions on upstream projects rely, to a large extent, on the robustness of the predicted ultimate recovery and production forecast associated with the chosen development concept. The challenge for the E&P industry [...]

New Time-Rate Relations for Decline-Curve Analysis of Unconventional Reservoirs This work presents a workflow that can be used to analyze and forecast time/rate data of wells in low-and ultralow-permeability reservoirs. The key component of the workflow is the application of diagnostic plots to guide the analysis and obtain model parameters for a given time/ rate relation. Once model parameters are obtained, the production profile [...]