Issue: July 2017
Special Focus
The answer is always changing. What works today probably won’t be the solution tomorrow. In addressing the current demands of the offshore industry, the biggest single challenge may be staying relevant.
Oil well drillers have used the same principle for bottom-hole cleaning for the last 100 years. A new project on borehole stability has revealed several advantages after making changes to this system.
Features
In an exclusive interview at the company’s headquarters in north Houston, Halliburton President Jeff Miller, newly named as CEO, visited with Gulf Publishing Vice President Ron Higgins and Editor-in-Chief Kurt Abraham, to outline his thoughts and priorities for the firm’s next few years.
In a low-price oil environment, operators strive to maintain production on established wells. Stimulating is one way to achieve the goal, although selecting the best type of treatment is not always straightforward. Decline curve analysis is a cost-effective tool for identifying suitable candidates for production enhancement. The methodology minimizes financial risk, and yields justifiable economic returns.
Combining an in-depth field analysis with mechanical isolation and a targeted stimulation treatment will greatly enhance the success of a refracturing program.
As the inventory of single-well pads in North American shale plays continues to build, the industry needs to determine: 1) What is the optimum spacing for an in-fill well; 2) Where should new multiple in-fill wells be drilled? An engineered approach enhances play economics and ensures maximized recovery with the least capital expenditure.
While much of West Africa suffers from economic hardship, political turmoil and corruption, other regions are thriving. Despite the risk to E&P activity in these precarious areas of operation, producers cannot ignore its abundant resources and its affluent potential to be an international hydrocarbon hotbed.
SPE’s biennial Offshore Europe (OE) E&P conference and exhibition will be held at the Aberdeen Exhibition & Conference Center in Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, during Sept. 5–8. The conference, which is recognized as a top E&P event in Europe, is organized to connect professionals with the global industry, and allow them to acquire new technical know-how, as well as to stay in touch with the latest business trends.
Adopting new technology is a major challenge in a low-cost commodity environment. However, adoption of ceramic sand screens has gained traction, as they are considerably more durable than conventional screens and produce notable improvements in well efficiency while reducing costs.
The industry’s increasing emphasis on proactive sand control requires an evolving approach to well completions.
The Big Data trend is often ignored because current market conditions demand actionable outcomes of significant value. One manufacturer has now developed the first cross-industry commercial system that uses Big Data to achieve such outcomes.
Columns
Last month, Calgary again hosted the annual Global Petroleum Show, attended by more than 47,000 oil and gas professionals from Canada and another 110 countries, including the U.S.
It’s the end of June and the heat is becoming unbearable, here in Texas. But it’s not just the heat. It is also the continuing actions of U.S. shale producers who, for the 23rd week in a row, have increased the U.S. rig count.
Controls, sensors, smart phones, tablets and analytics are becoming as ubiquitous as drill bits and wellheads in today’s oil field. As an industry, we must continue to push the envelope of innovation, to keep shale plays competitive with other parts of the world.
These days, it’s popular to predict doom and gloom, then say it isn’t so. Gloom means way lower than $45 oil.
Last time we talked, the subject was high-energy gas fracturing, a method that offers the alluring possibility of eliminating the use of water, the sourcing and disposal of which—as proliferating offers of solutions indicate—is a major headache in hydraulic fracturing.
The recent crisis that has begun in the Gulf—which led to the boycott of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt—has raised several questions about Qatar’s natural gas and LNG resources, that serve as a supply source to neighboring countries and global markets.
After the Deepwater Horizon blowout on the Macondo well seven years ago, the offshore oil and gas industry had to redouble its efforts to protect people, property and the environment in the Gulf of Mexico from the effects of subsea incidents.
That frustrated sigh you hear is a freshly minted engineer tasked with sorting through voluminous sensor-generated data streams, in an attempt to isolate a trend that could explain why a current drilling campaign is sustaining higher rates of non productive time (NPT) than offsets.
An “old” tradition is re-emerging in the U.S. Although exporting gas produced from American shale plays through the LNG process was initially designed as a market-finding initiative, it’s now being structured to combat economic aggression overseas.
News & Resources
Sanchez Energy Corp. sold its non-core Marquis asset to Lonestar Resources for approximately $50 million.
Despite OPEC’s nine-month, output cut extension, the cartel’s control over global crude markets continued to wane, with record-high Russian production and increased U.S. supply offsetting the cutbacks.
Melody Meyer has been elected as a non-executive director on the board of BP.
TWMA, an international environmental solutions provider, has secured two new projects in the central North Sea.
Bright Automation has released its new integrated wireless load cell/accelerometer.
