Impact of production and development RD&D ranked

Oct. 30, 1995
Guntis Moritis Production Editor The National Petroleum Council (NPC) survey of the oil and gas industry's research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) needs includes a wide diversity of production and development technologies. The NPC survey put 27 technologies in the production category and 34 in the development category. Deepwater production and development was a separate category with 16 entries. Respondents also wrote in a number of additional technologies not covered in the NPC

Guntis Moritis
Production Editor

The National Petroleum Council (NPC) survey of the oil and gas industry's research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) needs includes a wide diversity of production and development technologies.

The NPC survey put 27 technologies in the production category and 34 in the development category. Deepwater production and development was a separate category with 16 entries.

Respondents also wrote in a number of additional technologies not covered in the NPC list. One write-in wished for "accurate price forecasting." Commenting on barriers and problems of new technology, one respondent wrote, "Our industry as a whole, and our company in particular, has reduced staff to a point to where it is difficult to take advantage of new technology." Another said, "The latest technologies seem to be too expensive relative to their benefits."

Production

RD&D on microbial EOR, combustion, thermal processes, and thickeners for CO2 floods were four technolgies that respondents ranked as having a lower future impact on the oil and gas industry (Fig. 1)(58121 bytes). All four general categories of respondents (majors, other integrated oil and gas companies, independents, and service companies) gave similar responses. From Fig. 1 (58121 bytes), the research, development, demonstration (RD&D) projects that the respondents said would have the highest impact on production were:

  • Stimulation techniques
  • Advanced recovery of natural gas
  • Near well bore stimulation
  • New directional drilling techniques
  • Recompletion technology.

The survey ranked advanced recovery of natural gas and near well bore stimulation as having only a moderate likelihood of becoming commercial by year-end 1999, while the other three technologies have a higher likelihood for commerciality.

The report said all four industry sectors surveyed indicated that stimulation technology will have the highest future impact on production. Respondents had only a moderate expectation of meeting this need in the short-term, but expectations are much higher for the long-term (2000-2010).

Independents and other integrated companies ranked as high impact the technologies for advanced recovery of natural gas.

New directional drilling methods will be needed in the future, but all sectors generally expect these to be available, according to the report.

Development

In oil and gas field development (Fig. 2)(75774 bytes), the respondents said that new and improved technologies with the highest impact would be:

  • Development-scale seismic geological modeling
  • Computer-based 3D geological modeling
  • Permeability logging techniques
  • Through-casing logging
  • Advanced reservoir simulation modeling
  • Reservoir property identification
  • Seismic/log/core calibration
  • Deep investigation techniques.

Survey results indicate that both development-scale seismic geological modeling and computer-based 3D geological modeling have a high likelihood of becoming commercial by year-end 1999. But improved through-casing logging, to estimate such parameters as permeability, are expected only in the long-term (2000-2010).

Major oil and gas companies said their interest lay in developing logging tools that could investigate at depths greater than 1 ft from the well bore but the other three industry sectors felt that their short-term needs would be met by advances in through-casing logging. New or improved tracer techniques, expendable well bore instrumentation, and tracers (biological/chemical/radioactive) will have the least impact, according to respondents.

The report said that a large number of respondents wrote in that advances in characterizing fractured reservoirs was a critical need for both development and exploration.

Deepwater

Oil and gas fields are starting to be developed in water depths of 3,000 ft, although hydrocarbons have been found in much greater water depth, such as one discovery in over 7,000 ft of water. These depths require new innovative technology to be commercially exploited. NPC put deepwater development and production into a separate category (Fig. 3)(41393 bytes). Except for four technologies, all others were ranked as being high impact. Most respondents also had a high expectation of these technologies being commercialized by year-end 1999.

High impact and high likelihood of becoming commercial were given to RD&D projects aimed at drilling and extended reach drilling and production. For the short-term, NPC prioritized the deepwater needs as follows:

  • Multiphase pumps
  • Risers
  • Flow lines
  • Flow meters
  • Workover
  • Hydrate prevention
  • Subsea equipment
  • Extended reach wells
  • Drilling.

Only majors identified needs in the long-term: multiphase pumps and workovers.

The write-in areas concentrated on mooring systems, paraffin buildup prevention, and pipeline laying, repairing, and pigging. Two other areas of high concern were remote power distribution systems and remote controls.

Ongoing projects

According to the NPC report, the national laboratories and the National Institute for Petroleum & Energy Research (Niper) are involved in 90 projects categorized as primary technology needs and include 69 development, 24 production, and 7 deepwater projects. The 1991-1995 funding is $123 million for development, $33 million for production, and $4 million for deepwater.

In addition, a number of projects are categorized as secondary. Excluding projects duplicated under other catagories, these additional projects and funding include 17 development with $27 million, 20 production with $40 million, and 6 deepwater with $9 million.

In the development primary and secondary category, the project shown with the most funding (almost $18 million), is the field demonstrations in high-priority reservoirs. This program, conducted by Niper, has the objective of maximizing the economically and environmentally sound recovery of oil from known domestic reservoirs.

The program plans to demonstrate improved oil recovery processes and reservoir characterization methods and transfer the technology to the oil industry. The targets are reservoirs with the highest potential of increased recovery and highest probability of abandonment.

The development project with the next highest 1991-1995 funding ($8 million) is Oak Ridge Laboratories' tracer technology project that involves radioisotopes from a large number of elements. The program impacts applications in more than just the oil and gas industry.

The production project in the primary category with the highest funding ($4.5 million) is the Oak Ridge Laboratories program on pipeline safety that provides technical and engineering support to the Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS). This project is also in the deepwater secondary projects category.

Next highest funded project ($4 million) is Idaho National Engineering Laboratory's microbial enhanced oil recovery and reservoir fundamentals project. The project involves cooperative research with Phillips Petroleum Co.

In deepwater primary projects, the highest funded project ($1.4 million) is Los Alamos National Laboratories' investigation on damage detection and health monitoring of structures and mechanical systems.

One project, categorized in the secondary development projects, is a $4.5 million project operated by Sandia National Laboratories on developing a gas and oil national information infrastructure. Part of this project includes the use of telephone modems coupled with the Internet Mosaic and World Wide Web systems to give independents access to oil and gas information systems.

Sandia's fracturing diagnosis projects, listed as a secondary production project and funded for $3.5 million, involves imaging hydraulic fracture growth using primarily seismic data. Although primarily aimed at tight gas sands, the technology is also seen as being important in waste injection of such items as drill cuttings.

Some of the other ongoing projects listed by the report in the development and production category include:

  • Measurement of the individual flow rates of oil, gas, and water from each well in a field to
  • improve reservoir management strategies for optimizing total production over the life of the
  • field.
  • Development of microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) systems for medium and heavy crudes.
  • Wettability studies on the interaction of fluid and mineral surfaces.
  • Influence of clay and clay fluid interactions on seismic wave attenuation in reservoir rock.
  • Feasibility of steam drive in diatomite reservoirs which in California are said to contain about 10 billion bbl of original-oil-in-place. Wells now are on 58 acre spacing.
  • Characterization of fractured reservoirs. Because fracture networks can be highly heterogeneous, some wells are connected to fracture flow paths and others are not.
  • Optimal fluid injection and producibility in fractured, low-permeability reservoirs.
  • Building a prototype virtual reality/visualization system, as an alternate technique for visualizing fluid fluxes calculated in reservoir simulations.
  • Use of crosshole, low-frequency electromagnetic imaging for reservoir characterization and process monitoring.
  • Computer simulation of nuclear well logging devices. Advances in computer power have made use of deterministic methods for this application feasible.
  • Models of ocean currents and eddies.
  • Fine-scale simulation models that use data from 3D seismic imaging. These techniques, however, can lead to more complexity in numerical methods, solution matrices, software design, and computational performance challenges.
  • Study of naturally occurring radioactive materials, or NORM, in waste and equipment from oil and gas operations.
  • Advanced perforator technology such as perforator design, high-temperature-stable materials, and initiating perforator detonation.
  • Design of a reservoir simulator for massively parallel processor computers to allow more accurate simulations over larger reservoir volumes. Although production software for reservoir simulation is fairly well developed, codes that fully exploit the power of MPP to generate the model and solve the associated linear equations are said to be practically nonexistent.
  • Characterization of fractured rock so that more oil can be recovered. As an example, the estimated ultimate recovery from Spraberry/Dean sands of West Texas is only 5% of the estimated 9.4 billion bbl of the original oil-in-place.
  • Application of alkaline-surfactant-polymer which has shown promise for economic oil recovery and is very applicable to independent producers.
  • Improving reservoir sweep efficiency by polymer surfactant systems that generate stable foams in reservoir environments.
  • Imaging techniques using X-ray computed topography, nuclear magnetic resonance microscopy, minipermeanmetry, and petrographic image analysis to study oil recovery mechanisms and the effect of small scale rock heterogeneity on oil entrapment.
  • Hydraulic fracturing process in nonvertical wells.
  • Advanced computation models for deepwater oil and gas production in conjunction with DeepStar Consortium, a cooperative oil and gas industry endeavor to develop technologies for oil and gas fields in water depths greater than 6,000 ft.
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