The industry just completed three of its most significant annual events, gatherings that helped show off how far we have come along the technological road and offered clues about the distance we still have to go to meet primary goals of better production.

Maybe a couple of examples from the Society of Petroleum Engineers Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition will explain.

  • BJ Services’ LiteProp ultra-lightweight proppant helped make slickwater recoveries from horizontal wells practical in the Barnett Shale in the Fort Worth Basin of Texas. The resin-coated, chemically modified walnut hulls with a specific gravity close to the brine frac fluid placed the proppant better in the fractures. The ultra-lightweight proppant treatment can achieve the same results as standard fracture treatment that cost 50% more. A series of wells treated with the relatively new technique produced 22% more oil cumulatively over a year because production declined more slowly.
  • A paper presented by WellDynamics looked at a multilateral well in Oman with a 99% water cut in a field where a 75% water cut was the norm. After installing intelligent well gauges and lateral cutoff capability, the company found the offending lateral, shut down its production and reduced water cut to 71% with the same fluid flow. The well now will produce an additional 600,000 bbl of oil.

At the International Association of Drilling Contractors annual meeting, a couple of potential challenges appeared.

  • Some 102 new deepwater rigs are under construction around the world, and 55 of those new rigs are being built by 31 startup companies. “I question how expectations will match reality. Those rigs don’t have crews, and the companies will have a tough time finding trained people. That raises questions about performance and safety. The big issue is staff. Where do you find (staff for) one Transocean or two Nobles?” asked Lee Ahlstrom, vice president of investor relations and planning with Noble Corp.
  • Technology is the key to holding down costs that can drive a US $1 billion project to $3 billion, said Don Jacobsen, vice president, technical wells for Shell Exploration & Production. Among technologies are surface blowout preventers that allow the company to work in 9,000 ft (2,745 m) of water with a floating rig built for a 6,000-ft (1,830-m) water depth.
  • Joel Kiker, global drilling manager for ExxonMobil Development Corp., is looking for ways for his company to produce 60% more oil and gas by 2030. That will require technology such as the Parker-built most powerful land rig working at Sakhalin 1.
  • Kevin Lacy, head of discipline-drilling and completions for BP, looked at technological challenges facing the industry in more than 10,000 ft (3,050 m) of water and in high-temperature, high-pressure reservoirs. “We’re now working in pressures and temperatures never seen before. We’re talking about when we will see a 20,000 psi stack,” he said.

At the Society of Exploration Geophysicists annual meeting, challenges and solutions took the spotlight.

  • Julio Friedmann, director of the Carbon Management Program, Energy & Environment Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, speaking at an Appro seminar, outlined Anadarko Petroleum Corp.’s challenge in finding out where the CO2 went in its Salt Creek flood in Wyoming. Because only 4% of the casing length on 19 wells was in the formation, electric resistance measurements through casing were noisy, and deterministic modeling was unreliable. The team turned to stochastic modeling using computer power to create tens of thousands of models and find the best history matches. The first model show a 16% probability the CO2 would flow from injector to producer. After 5 weeks of real data added, the model showed a 97% probability of accurate flow.
  • Samir Abdelmoaty, deputy exploration performance unit leader for BP in Egypt, described cost-effectiveness of thorough preparation using his company’s Raven discovery in deepwater offshore Egypt as an example. The company did the geological and geophysical work to draw up a basin and regional picture and built an inventory of leads. A multi-azimuth seismic survey using six different azimuths provided information that found Raven. Front end work may cost tens of millions of dollars, he said, but that led to drilling that cost $120 million per well and a production system at Raven with a $3 billion price tag.

The three conferences offered hundreds of examples of old and new challenges facing the industry and nearly as many examples of various technologies and scientific approaches assembled by the industry to meet those challenges.

That technology results in better wells producing more hydrocarbons from increasingly difficult environments in increasingly remote and hostile parts of the world.

It’s a great time to be in the industry.