Agenda

Drilling and well construction are considered some of the most critical phases in the life cycle of an offshore oil and gas well. However, in a demand-driven energy economy that is ever growing, operators, drilling contractors, and technology service providers are faced with the challenge of not only delivering high quality wells on time, but having to do so in the most economical and efficient way possible, without compromising operation safety, well integrity, or production quality.

This session will explore the role of applying the right technology in pushing the offshore drilling efficiency boundaries further, to deliver the optimum well design while addressing challenges such as drilling and completing wells while managing abnormal pressure zones, loss circulation, hole instability, depletion, well control, and sour gas operations.

The depth of the target reservoirs and the environmental constraint often affect the design of the wells offshore, hence, having the latest technologies could be an enabler for drilling teams to push the boundaries of efficiency further while addressing the challenges of drilling and completing deep and extended reach wells.

This session will also attempt to discuss the concept of breaking performance barriers, and attempt to explore the idea of where are the limits?

This session will address the automation of offshore drilling rigs and offshore production installations and the development of work processes to enable remote operations. Reducing personnel reduces the risk working in demanding environments such as H2S environments with their particular HSE challenges. Remote drilling operations, e.g. for directional drilling and cementing, were introduced to the drilling industry in the past years. The session will review results and discuss the impact of the changes in the workflow and process efficiency.

Automation and remote operations require changes in rig site workflows and control equipment, instrumentation and communication infrastructure. The session will discuss emerging new technologies such as 5G and wide area wireless networks and cloud versus edge approaches. We will discuss digital twin technology to simulate operations in various scenarios and support decision making and control, as well as models used, their validation and accuracy.

Safe, efficient, and effective offshore field operations is crucial to improve the overall productivity and performance of oil and gas operators. Many technical and commercial challenges need a SMART approach to reach smooth operations with minimum time loss. 

Planning and weather predictions play significant roles to ensure successful implementation of simultaneous operations of production, drilling, construction, and project activities.

Personnel transfer methodologies, lifting operations, hot work activities at night, rig moves, vessels movement, berthing and limited space on existing offshore production facilities need careful consideration and full control. 

Operating sour gas fields, remote fields, LNGs and ageing facilities require high levels of competency, full compliance with procedures, and planned maintenance systems. 

Risk management will address all barriers and mitigations to work with accepted risks in ALARP, safety case of production facilities, and drilling rigs issued by regulators is important to ensure safe operations.

Planning of logistic management and availability of reliable resources and margins reduces loss of time. 

Part of the offshore development is to sustain growth and protect the environment. This session will highlight the economic impact of using technology and utilising the latest artificial intelligent tools, in order to have best cost efficient operations. Renewable transformation affects remote production and operations by providing solar or wind energy to keep remote areas going. Changing behaviour to deal with our operations will require education, establishing processes, and governing direction that will enable all to adapt to ethics and agility.

This will not require a brand new infrastructure or new facilities but can be achieved through reusing and equipping existing facilities with technologies and intelligent methods to extend life expectancy with safe operations. In order to move forward as an oil and gas community, we must come together to innovate, collaborate, and enable more sustainable environmental operations. 

As next generation, smarter assets are deployed, oil and gas companies will continue to evolve their operations and processes to ensure technology is helping them to run the safest, lowest cost, and most productive assets possible.

In this session, we will focus on the topics of big data, IoT, and analytics.  We will explore how vast quantities of data can now be collected from anywhere in our oil and gas operations including the ever growing number of ‘smart’ IoT devices and processed in in near real-time, increasingly triggering automated responses and workflows across our operating assets. We will explore different types of analysis, including high performance streaming analytics and advanced A.I. and machine learning in the cloud. 

We will share our own experiences and invite discussions from the audience on any examples of where companies have successfully overcome the challenges of data analytics, IoT, automation and cloud computing within their own organisations.

With the increasing demand for energy, sustainable hydrocarbon production has to be achieved. Oil and gas reservoirs start maturing and ageing with hydrocarbon production. Field operators need to take the necessary actions to maintain oil and gas production for years to come. This session focuses on the recent advances in technology used to prolong the life of an asset. These technologies can be applied at different stages of a field life and can aid in the following:

• Field characterisation in order to identify any geohazard
• Well and facility integrity
• Asset Inspection with less intervention to regular workflow
• Asset maintenance and failure prediction
• Upgrade of existing facilities
• EOR/IOR techniques to recover capillary trapped and unswept oils
• Surface and subsurface monitoring

This session will feature advancement in technology related to simulation and present up-to-date hi-speed simulators that enable saving run-time by an exponential factor.

The session will also illustrate technology advancement in areas related to subsurface logging by presenting latest logging tools. This will include new logging tools for reservoir characterisation, surveillance activities, and collecting data with high accuracy in real-time.

Advancement in seismic acquisition enables further understanding of reservoir characteristics and structure anomalies. This is complemented by advances in computing power for processing and interpolation in higher resolution and better reflection. 

Emerging enhanced recovery techniques, field cases, and new methodologies that help in  prolonging the economical life of the field will be addressed in this session. New approaches and methods to lift hydrocarbons in challenging offshore environments will also be discussed.

This session will also present up-to-date technology advancement in unconventional offshore reservoirs. This will include latest development of techniques and tools to economically produce from challenging surface and subsurface environments.