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Vol. 58 No. 10

October 2006

Company News

Emerging Technology

  • Statoil plans to use seabed compression to try to produce more gas from the Åsgard field in the Norwegian Sea, the first use of this technology for commercial purposes. Boosting the pressure in the gas flow, the seabed compressor will compensate for dropping pressure in the reservoir. Gas production from Åsgard is expected to increase by 25% with the technology.
  • Chevron MolecularDiamond Technologies (MDT) and Stanford U. announced the creation of a nanotechnology research program to further the development and application of a new class of nanomaterials derived from petroleum. The Program for Diamondoid Nanoscience will build upon recent discoveries by researchers at MDT and leverage the research capabilities of Stanford. The 4-year research program will foster development of diamondoids, diamondlike molecules with potential applications in a variety of industries.
  • The U.S. Dept. of Energy announced two cost-shared research and development projects targeting tight gas formations. In the first, the U. of Texas at Austin will design and implement fracturing jobs “energized” with carbon dioxide or nitrogen. The main goal of this project is to add thermal and compositional capabilities to 3D hydraulic-fracture models, which will allow operators to design and optimize energized fracture jobs systematically. In the second project, the Massachusetts Inst. of Technology will develop a novel analytical technique to better locate and characterize naturally fractured sweet spots and induced fractures in tight gas formations.
  • Knowledge Systems Inc. will lead a new joint-industry project on wellbore stability methodologies aimed at reducing well-construction problems such as wellbore collapse and lost circulation. The project plans to examine about 250 wellbores from five regions around the world: U.S. deepwater Gulf of Mexico, U.S. Gulf of Mexico shelf, western Canada, Australian northwest shelf, and the North Sea. The study will begin in early 2007 and will take approximately 12 months to complete.
  • BHP Billiton opened a new global technology center in Perth, Western Australia, the company’s third such center. It will be staffed by 40 BHP Billiton technology-innovation workers, who will relocate from offices across Australia.

Corporate Moves

  • Sondex plc, an international technology supplier to the oil and gas industry, formed a new company called Sondex Drilling Tools Inc. to handle its measurement-while-drilling and logging-while-drilling instruments. The move follows the recent acquisition by Sondex of Bluestar Tools, a Canadian-based business specializing in the design, manufacture, and supply of instrumentation and tools for drilling operations.
  • Qatar Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell launched the Pearl Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) project in Qatar. The project includes development of offshore natural gas resources in Qatar’s North field, transporting and processing the gas to extract natural gas liquids and ethane, and conversion of the remaining gas into clean liquid hydrocarbon products through the construction of a GTL complex in Ras Laffan Industrial City.

Mergers and Acquisitions

  • Roxar A/S acquired Energy Scitech Ltd., a U.K.-based consultancy and software development company. Energy Scitech’s flagship product is Enable, a history-matching and uncertainty-estimation software used for measuring uncertainty in reservoir production-performance predictions and in optimizing plans for oil and gas fields.
  • Paradigm successfully completed its acquisition of Earth Decision, a provider of shared-Earth-modeling software. The acquisition combines the companies’ complementary technology portfolios.
  • India’s state-owned Oil & Natural Gas Corp. teamed up with Chinese government-owned Sinopec to buy half of Colombian oil company Omimex de Colombia. China and India both have been seeking new supplies to satisfy rapidly growing demand for oil.
  • M-I Swaco broadened its wellbore cleanup solutions portfolio with the acquisition of Specialized Petroleum Services Group Ltd. (SPS) of Aberdeen from 3i, a venture capital company. SPS products and services are designed to minimize damage to the reservoir face and deliver an unobstructed wellbore for maximized completion efficiency.
  • Fugro acquired Canadian data-management company Trango Technologies and purchased the business activities of the geotechnical company ECOS GmbH of Germany.
  • IHS Inc. acquired Calgary-based Canadian Hydrodynamics Ltd., a provider of comprehensive drillstem test information for the western Canadian sedimentary basin.
  • Lukoil acquired 63% interest in an exploration, development, and production project on deepwater Block CI-205 offshore Cote d’Ivoire from Oranto Petroleum Intl. Ltd., a private Nigerian company. Block CI-205 is located in the Gulf of Guinea.

Contracts and Tenders

  • Turkish state oil company Turkiye Petrolleri A.O. has contracted WesternGeco to conduct the largest high-specification Q-Marine 3D exploration surveys undertaken in the Black Sea. The WesternGeco Q vessel Western Pride will conduct two 3D marine seismic surveys over deepwater Blocks 3922-Sinop and 3920-Kozlu.
  • Veritas DGC Inc. and Seitel Inc. formed an alliance to reprocess and license Seitel’s nonexclusive seismic data in the Gulf of Mexico shelf region. The Seitel library contains prestack time migration data covering 954 blocks in the Gulf of Mexico.
  • BJ Tubular Services was awarded a contract by Oxy Libya LLC to provide casing- and tubing-running services, as well as float equipment, centralizers, and thread compounds, for 27 exploration wells scheduled for drilling on Oxy’s concessions in the Sirte, Murzuq, and Cyrenaica regions.