G. Alan Petzet
Exploration Editor
Oil and gas operators and service companies are participating in several cooperative exploration research projects.
Advantages to joint research include accomplishing more goals with constrained budgets, reducing duplication of effort, and cutting finding costs.
Conoco Inc. is serving as contractor for an Enhanced Exploration Research Project that started up in the field in July at its borehole test facility near Ponca City, Okla.
The effort's first project consists of drilling two new wells at the site in order to study a variety of commercial and prototype measurement while drilling (MWD) devices.
More than 50 operating and service companies, research organizations, and universities are participating.
Meanwhile, the Petroleum Geochemistry Consortium last month kicked off its second 2 1/2 year research project. The consortium is an agreement to help fund researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, Calif., to continue efforts to develop software that will aid in locating oil deposits.
About 12 oil companies are members of the consortium, which operates in cooperation with the University of California, manager of LLNL, and the Department of Energy- Data developed from the projects will be distributed to all participants for proprietary evaluation.
EXPLORATION PROJECT
Participants in the Conoco led project put up $30,000/company for the MWD evaluation.
Conoco has drilled two research wells to about 3,200 ft, penetrating sandstones and limestones with 0-26% porosity and 0.5-200 ohm-m in resistivity. The drilling interval also includes open fractures and organic shale, said Don Whitfill, director of Conoco's reservoir and recovery research division.
Eight vendors will demonstrate 20 commercial and prototype MWD devices worth $300,000 to $3 million/tool. The tools help evaluate hydrocarbon prospects and reserves by measuring resistivity, neutron porosity, bulk density, downhole drilling parameters, and other properties.
The tools are of particular interest in the drilling of horizontal and highly deviated wells.
Eight wire line companies will demonstrate their state of the art logging tools as part of another research project after the wells are drilled, said Mark Hutchinson, Conoco project coordinator who originated the EERP idea.
Conoco hopes the initial efforts will establish a permanent joint industry test facility. Participating companies are based in the U.S., France, the U.K., Norway, Japan, Italy, Brazil, Venezuela, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, and Canada. More companies have been invited to join the project.
GEOCHEMISTRY CONSORTIUM
Members of the geochemistry consortium will pay $15,000/company for the next 30 month run.
Work the past 3 years concentrated on developing three computer programs, known as Kinetics, Easy-Percent-Ro, and Pyrol.
The programs and other analytical tools use data from laboratory experiments at LLNL and elsewhere to determine where and when oil and gas are formed in the subsurface over geologic time. They also seek to predict the size and quality of oil and gas accumulations.
Reliability of the programs is being tested in several areas, including the Maracaibo basin in Venezuela and Uinta basin in Utah, said Alan Burnham, project leader. Tests are planned in the Williston basin.
Since the 1960s, LLNL scientists have studied Colorado oil shale deposits. In 1983 they developed Pyrol, a software program that calculates how the amounts and kinds of products generated in laboratory experiments using Colorado oil shale vary with time, temperature, and pressure.
In 1985 they demonstrated that this complex code could also predict where oil is formed in similar rock formations more deeply buried in Utah.
Later the Kinetics software program was written for personal computer use. The program simplifies the derivation from the laboratory experiments of parameters used in programs such as Pyrol.
In the cost shared research, LLNL scientists are extending the work on Colorado and Utah oil shale to more significant oil and gas producing basins.
Pyrol has been modified to estimate how much oil and gas has been expelled from source rock for possible accumulation in an oil reservoir.
After geologic thermal histories are estimated from published information and fed into Pyrol, the resulting predictions of oil formation will be compared with geologic evidence.
Future research is expected to focus on oil cracking to help scientists determine the depth to which an oil reservoir is stable for production.
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