When prices plummeted a year ago, about the only course of action open to many companies was to “open the valves” a bit more to increase volume, and those that couldn’t open the valves had to look for other ways to boost production. As a result there has been a period of innovative applications of technologies and techniques aimed at coaxing more oil and gas out of existing reservoirs. While this has been a much needed boon to the industry, eventually producers will need to invest in more exploration. And thus the cycle will begin again.

It’s not easy to identify milestones in a downcycle — furlong-stones are more likely in the horse race to improve production. Nevertheless, some recent industry achievements deserve recognition. Space does not permit acknowledgment of all the many programs and projects that added incrementally to production. We have tried to enumerate a few that we believe may have a profound, long-lasting effect on production. If we overlooked yours, please forgive us.

You may be asking why a drilling feat is listed as a production milestone. The reason should be obvious. By proving that reservoirs can be tapped from as much as 7.6 miles (12.2 km) from a single surface location, the production potential of a platform in terms of incremental drainage area was enhanced by 4.4 sq miles (11.3 sq km) from the previous record. That’s a lot of acreage. The benefits of extended reach drilling (ERD) have been proven many times. Beginning with BP’s famous Wytch Farm development, ERD has allowed access to millions of barrels of incremental production. And for a bonus, it has done so while dramatically reducing the environmental footprint of the oil field on the surface.

Environment has played a major role on Sakhalin Island, where ERD wells tap distant reservoirs lying beneath a hostile sea. By locating drilling rigs and subsequent production pads onshore, the reservoirs can be produced despite the vicious annual onslaught of sea ice. For several years Sakhalin drilling had claimed the crown of the new record-holder for ERD wells, displacing Wytch Farm. Now it is the Gulf of Bahrain that holds the record with the Maersk Oil Qatar well, which also marked the first record-setting ERD well drilled from an offshore rig.

But records are meant to be broken, and already Parker Drilling Company is building a massive arctic drilling unit on a pad at BP’s Endicott field on Alaska’s North Slope. The target — BP’s Liberty discovery lying under the Beaufort Sea, a whopping 8.6 miles (13.8 km) from the surface location.

Not only is production potential enhanced by extending our reach, but the resulting horizontal drainholes promise much greater production potential in their own right. With the technology of geosteering, wells can be placed precisely within the highest quality reservoir sections to contact more reservoir volumes and enhance production rates.

As production ideas go, the Independence Hub is a clear winner. With its ability to ultimately produce natural gas from up to 16 separate subsea fields, the semisubmersible production facility is located in 7,920 ft (2,414 m) of water in Mississippi Canyon Block 920 in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GoM). By linking several small fields, some as much as 40 miles (64 km) from the hub, the facility can access production volumes that make economic sense in the depressed natural gas market.

The hub-and-spoke technique has been applied in smaller scale in several deepwater oil fields in the GoM, the cumulative volume of the small fields justifying the investment in the production facility. Typically, hub-and-spoke facilities can be operated round the clock by fewer than 20 people. Because they are afloat, when production finally becomes uneconomical, they can be moved and re-purposed.

The keyword is “floating,” but the key implication is movable. After overcoming years of red tape, it is interesting that a foreign company was able to persevere and acquire permission to operate a floating production, storage, and offloading vessel (FPSO) in the US GoM. Skeptics doubted it would ever happen, but the first FPSO in the Gulf is about to become a reality. One of the chief impediments holding back the FPSO concept was the frequency of severe hurricanes that annually invade Gulf waters. However, Petrobras was able to convince the doubters that its innovative submerged turret and docking system provided the ability for the vessel to disconnect quickly from the production riser and steam away to safe harbor, or at least out of the storm’s path. Afterward, reconnecting and re-establishing production could be accomplished in a straightforward manner. The idea is inherently safer than that of semipermanent installations or permanent platforms that have no choice but to remove personnel and hope the facility can ride out the storm.

At the other end of the flowline from the various offshore production facilities is the wellhead. While distant wellheads have been successful (see Independence Hub) none come close the range of Cameron’s DC-tree installed on the floor of the Dutch North Sea. Designed to operate as much as 120 miles (192 km) from the mother ship or platform, the DC tree allows full operation and control of subsea wellheads in a potential area of 11,310 sq miles (28, 953 sq km). The economic and environmental implications of being able to produce subsea wells over such a broad area are obvious. Wellheads in sea lanes or other sensitive areas could be remotely operated and controlled from surface facilities, which could be sited in more sheltered waters, away from iceberg alleys or other hazards.

But of most interest are the implications for production. With a single facility, numerous small fields could be developed and produced using remotely controlled wellheads. The Cameron DC-tree is the first of a series of subsea production and processing modules called “CamForce” that have been introduced recently. Such production operations as subsea separation, boosting, and metering can be combined with the subsea electric tree. Even interventions are accommodated with a unique multiple application reinjection system that has been characterized as a subsea “USB” port. Capable of installation on any horizontal spool tree, this module can accommodate virtually any intervention connection, providing safe, high-integrity access to the well for workovers or production measurements.

Many innovative ideas have been launched claiming to optimize production. While each enhances production in one way or another, production optimization is a management activity, not a technical one. In order to manage anything, one needs data and lots of it.

But key to managing an enterprise with data is seamless integration of the data across the entire scope of the project.

Schlumberger has successfully launched its Avocet integrated asset management system that spans the gap from pore-to-pipeline, allowing its users to gauge the effect of any changes in the system on any particular node of the system. The final gap that was bridged was between subsurface production and surface processing. Heretofore, the gap between these two major segments of the production system was bridged by correlations, rules-of-thumb, and estimations. The Avocet system links the dynamic reservoir model, including its Eclipse numerical simulator, with the surface production network that includes the Pipesim simulator. Now engineers and managers can accurately scale surface facilities to accommodate expected production. Moreover, they can evaluate the overall effect of changes at any node in the production network before actually implementing the change. This essentially removes most of the decision risk.

Recently, the Avocet integrated asset management system has been augmented and enhanced by powering it with the Babelfish integrator. This allows virtually any aspect of the enterprise to be managed using the same system by allowing access to all relevant information. In addition to production optimization achievable from the Avocet system, virtually every facet of the enterprise can be accessed, from human resources to logistics. Previously, for example, a company could evaluate the effect of taking a gas compressor or booster pump offline for maintenance. Now it can also locate the required part or replacement as well as the domain expertise within the company to expedite the operation. Business software links allow accurate costing of the repair job and economic comparison of alternatives.

As production systems become more complex and sophisticated, software systems and efficient workflows are essential elements of production optimization by allowing the enterprise to evaluate and manage according to its own unique business model, financial constraints, or resource capabilities.

Good ideas stimulate better ideas

This is a non-exclusive list. Let us know your production milestones so we can add them to the rich mosaic of technology and techniques that sustain our industry now and in the future.

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