Agenda
Tuesday, December 06
Opening Remarks
Ghaith Al Hinai
Petroleum Development Oman
Adam Donald
SLB
Keynote Address
Dr. Saleh Al Anboori
Director-General of Exploration and Production of Oil and Gas
Ministry of Energy and Minerals
Welcome Remarks
Mohamed Al Marzouqi
SPE Regional Director
Senior Vice President Development
Development Function
ADNOC
Moderator(s):
Ghaith Al Hinai
PDO
Adam Donald
SLB
Speaker(s):
Anwar Al Kharusi
Vice President Business Development
OQ
Peter Jenson
ETSA Contract Manager
Jurassic Gas
Shell Kuwait
Rodney Reed
President, Completion Tools
NOV
Simon Ross
Vice President Technology Delivery RP
SLB
Anil Pandey
Managing Director- Strategy Lead for Oil & Gas Resource Industry
Accenture Middle East
External factors are playing more of a role in providing energy to the world. Tight gas specifically has challenges to maintain resilience throughout variable global and local markets, technology innovations, and social influences in the public. All of these factors influence demand for resources and confidence in delivering energy to consumers. The panel discussion for the third tight gas workshop will touch on these subjects with provocative questions from the moderators to highlight challenges for operators and service providers alike.
Session Chairs:
Mohammed Emera
Shell
Salmeen Al Marjabi
PDO
Buthaina Al Anbouri
bp
Presenters:
Khalid Al Harthy
Petroleum Development Oman LLC
Nagarjuna Arige
Shell Kuwait Exploration and Production BV
Salim Nasser Al Hajri
BP Oman
Garrett Lindsay
W. D. Von Gonten Engineering, LLC
The main challenge in tight gas development is to produce the reserves economically. To that end, it is critical to minimise the reservoir uncertainties in tight gas development through proper data acquisition, modelling, monitoring, and surveillance.
Additionally, one of the key elements for tight gas sustainability is diversifications of tight gas plays by challenging the geological dogmas and fully maximise the subsurface data.
This session will cover case studies of exploration and the use of seismic quantitative interpretation in tight gas reservoirs. It will also cover improvements in tight reservoir evaluations and reservoir development for different gas fields including unconventional.
Session Chairs:
Josef Shaoul
Fenix Consulting Delft
Jeremie Ferrand
TotalEnergies
Many of the people currently working in the Middle East had not yet started working when tight gas was first being developed in similar reservoirs of Europe and North America. Plus, the existing activities in North America are almost all unconventional, not tight-gas, so a lot of misunderstandings have occurred when taking “current” ideas from North America to the Middle East.
In this breakout session, a very well documented tight gas case with public data from Germany, the Soehlingen field, will be presented and will form the basis of the breakout session discussions.
The Soehlingen field was originally developed with 3 propped fractured vertical wells in the early 1980’s. The wells were technically successful, but were not economic. The first horizontal multi-frac well with 4 fracs was completed in 1994. It was both a technical and economic success. The next 4 horizontal multi-frac wells performed poorly. Potential reasons for this could include geological issues, reservoir properties, and the stimulation and completion methodology.
Workshop participants will be divided into 4 groups based on technical disciplines to discuss what was done better or worse in this historic case compared to current practices, and what can be learned from this case for the future development of tight gas reservoirs in the region.
Session Chairs:
Pedro Saldungaray
Carbo Ceramics
Dalil Alnouche
Halliburton
Presenters:
Ramzi Abdulkadir
Shell
Mohammed Munawar
NOV
Zillur Rahim
Rahim Petroleum Technology
Oleg Medvedev
Shell Kuwait E & P
Development of tight gas reservoirs has evolved to increasingly complex and lower permeability reservoirs. In this setting, conventional well completions have been pushed to the limit in their ability to deliver economically viable wells. To respond to this challenge and improve economics, the industry has turned to horizontal wells with multiple hydraulic fractures.
This session will present the latest technologies and practices in horizontal well drilling, multistage placement tools, stimulation and fracturing techniques, fluids and proppants, operations and resource optimisation and recycling.
Emphasis will be put on operational efficiencies, technical innovation, identification technology gaps and emerging solutions, best practices, and dos and don’ts emerged from both success and failure.
Session Chairs:
Mathew Paredes
Packers Plus
Mahambet Zholaushy
NOV
Oumer Tahir
Hunting Energy Services
Presenters:
Minquan Jin
Shell Kuwait Exploration and Production BV
Anton Charushin
Gulf Energy
Philippe Enkababian
SLB
Development of tight gas reservoirs has evolved to increasingly complex and lower permeability reservoirs. In this setting, conventional well completions have been pushed to the limit in their ability to deliver economically viable wells. To respond to this challenge and improve economics, the industry has turned to horizontal wells with multiple hydraulic fractures.
This session will present the latest technologies and practices in horizontal well drilling, multistage placement tools, stimulation and fracturing techniques, fluids and proppants, operations and resource optimisation and recycling.
Emphasis will be put on operational efficiencies, technical innovation, identification technology gaps and emerging solutions, best practices, and dos and don’ts emerged from both success and failure.
Wednesday, December 07
Session Chairs:
Josef Shaoul
Fenix Consulting Delft
Mohamed Al Harrasi
bp
Alwaleed Al-Shukaili
OQ
Presenters:
Abdolrahim Ataei
OQ Upstream E&P
Hilal Al Shibani
Petroleum Development Oman
Siyavash Motealleh
Adnoc Onshore
Tight gas wells are normally characterised by a rapid decline in the production rate due to the low permeability of the reservoir. Understanding tight gas well performance and optimising tight gas reservoir\field management needs to take into account this fundamental behaviour. Maintaining a field plateau rate, for example, usually means continual drilling of new\infill wells. If well performance improves over time, this usually means that the initial performance of the fracture stimulation is sub-optimal, and there is scope to improve stimulation performance in future wells.
Regionally, gas condensate wells that are drilled in tight sands suffer from condensate drop-out either within the reservoir or in tubing. Operators put a lot of effort in simulating and forecasting the decline in CGR to ensure the right measures are in-place for maintaining and extending the well life. This puts a lot of emphasis on field surveillance in terms of pressure monitoring and well-flow metering and operating strategy optimisations. In-addition, recovery methods such as velocity strings, surfactant injection, or gas lifting methods are employed to support well life extension in low-rate gas wells.
This session will focus on case studies related to optimising well and reservoir management for tight gas reservoirs for enhancement of gas and condensate recovery.
Session Chairs:
Sultan Al Julandani
OQ
Nabil Al Siyabi
PDO
Dingwei Weng
CNPC
Presenters:
Roberto De Mitri
SLB
Faisal Al-Aamri
Petroleum Development Oman
Ali Al-Hajri
OQ
David Clemmons
Interwell
One of the main challenges in tight gas development is to unload and unlock the remaining volume of hydrocarbons after reservoir depletion (production decline) using optimum technology. The challenges increase with uncertainty of project deliverability, especially when artificial lift or stimulation is required to produce hydrocarbons above the economic rate.
A workflow includes monitoring, surveillance, and modelling that are critical to evaluate uncertainty behaviour and overcome challenges. Monitoring provides production decline behaviour, surveillance is required to evaluate wellbore behaviour and reservoir performance, and modelling uses the data available to evaluate treatment requirement.
This session will discuss the latest technologies, practices, and lessons learnt in the monitoring, surveillance, and modelling of tight gas development. It includes artificial lift technology, re-frac and condensate banking challenges with technique availability.
Session Chairs:
Anwar Alsaleh
Kuwait Oil Company
Mankit Liu
Shell
The Paris Agreement’s (2016) long-term temperature goal is to keep the rise in mean global temperature to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and preferably limit increase to 1.5°C; recognising that this would substantially reduce effects of climate change. Emissions should be reduced as soon as possible and reach net-zero by the mid-21st century. However, to stay below 1.5°C of global warming, emissions need to be cut by roughly 50% by 2030. With the recent 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) held in Egypt (COP27, 27th Conference of the Parties), countries again pledged their commitment to this agreement.
For tight gas fields, this poses a significant challenge due to the relatively high eCO2 footprint to develop and operate these fields (fracking, clean-up, testing, etc.). In recent years, many improvements have been made in this area to reduce the eCO2 footprint of which a few will be presented in this workshop.
In this breakout session, we would like to discuss case(s) with the participants on how they would try to meet the given objectives while minimising the eCO2 footprint. We hope that participants apply their skills and knowledge and think of innovative ideas. At the end we will show how it was eventually done, what was actually considered, and hope that the participants put some of the ideas discussed in this session to practice for future development of tight gas fields.
Session Chairs:
Majid AlFarayedhi
Taqa
François Cantaloube
OPECS
Presenters:
Nelson Bolanos
SLB
Kaspar Vogt
Shell
Tarik Abdelfattah
Baker Hughes
Imagine a tight gas field providing sustainable and economical gas. A challenge, but achievable. This session is set to share solutions and answers to making tight gas sustainable and economical over the long term. We invite topics focused on value-based solutions, automation and decisions through real-time data analysis, integrated organisation structure working toward a unified goal through the life of the field, and last, but not least, supply chain. By being part of this session, you will gain knowledge and insight on applied solutions allowing you to expand your pool of solutions that can apply to your domain.
Session Chairs:
Moin Muhammad
NESR
Azzan Al Yaarubi
SLB
Presenters:
Sultan Al Harrasi
bp
Suha Saif
NESR
Rami Bakir
Messaben
Nabil Al Bulushi
Petroleum Development Oman
Following multiple years of global demand destruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, the ongoing acceleration of the global industrial cycle has yielded stark increases in commodity prices and is expected to drive robust expansion of OPEC supply. Operators in the Middle East are aiming to increase the overall capex spending by ~30%–40% Y/Y in 2022 (at the midpoint of most recent guidance). Moreover, given the overarching global focus on sustainability and ESG, the Middle Eastern operators also announced unprecedented investment in decarbonisation and energy transition technologies. A prevailing sector thesis is that while oil and gas will continue to dominate the energy landscape for decades to come, the O&G industry can (and must) drive decarbonisation for “cleaner” resource production by establishing strong GHG emission reduction/elimination initiatives, these include zero flare and CCU. In addition, the Middle East region needs to preserve precious natural aquifer (water) resource for human consumption and make the O&G sector self-reliant for all water needs using the water which is produced during the production of O&G.
This session will explore technological innovations, best practices, and achievements across the exploration and field development life cycle aimed to contribute to the 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement.