Overview

And now, what? We have been experiencing high oil prices for several months, which quickly translated into high rig rates. Of course, rig market is one obvious direct consequence of the current economic context, but this might not be the only one.

During the past months, we have seen operators drilling deeper to look for (and find) reservoirs in places where geologists did not see reservoirs 10 years ago because of limitations of seismic technology or of geological concepts. These wells cost tens of millions of dollars, and even if the learning curve improves, they will remain expensive. This trend has started in the Gulf of Mexico, but this simple idea of drilling deeper could soon apply in the North Sea, west Africa, Middle East, or Far East—in fact, probably all over the world.

The established energy-demand growth also has the oil industry focusing on maximizing recovery from each reservoir. Of course, people may try enhanced oil recovery in the end to recover the residual oil, but the first answer is to drill for reservoirs that were bypassed or which previously were too small to be economical. In this respect, minimizing well costs will still remain a major objective. In the meantime, and even if costs increase, use of complex completions may increase: sound monitoring and remotely controlled multizone completions will be implemented more often to optimize reservoir management.

Once again, technology will allow us to face these new challenges. But this technology will not be enough if new generations of drilling and completion engineers are not attracted by our profession and well trained. This issue may be at least as challenging as the technical one. In both areas, SPE has a role to play, and it will.

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Didier Gazaniol, SPE, is Wells and Drilling R&D Adviser for Total. He has more than 20 years’ experience in drilling/completion and well productivity. Gazaniol was involved in drilling/completion operations in France and Angola, engineering for well productivity and deep offshore development, and R&D dealing with directional drilling, wellbore stability, and high-pressure/high-temperature issues. He holds an Engineer degree from École Centrale de Paris, and he serves on the JPT Editorial Committee.

Overview

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