The future’s bright

Our oil and gas industry has been losing expertise since the last oil price crisis in the late 90s and the big crew change looms, further reducing experience and capability. While aging fields mean more demanding operating conditions and the necessity to move to secondary and tertiary recovery methods. Should we give up now?

Thankfully, necessity breeds invention and, as the industry scrambles to meet growing worldwide demand for hydrocarbons, technology is lending a much-needed hand. To develop and operate fields in more innovative ways is the mandate at the heart of the i-Field, the intelligent field, the Field Of The Future, or Smart Fields. Call them what you will, these applications all have one thing in common: the need to manage vast amounts of data, to model multiple realisations, to select options, to make decisions, and to plan and execute well optimisation work at an ever increasing pace to maximise value.

According to Royal Dutch Shell Executive Director Malcolm Brinded, more usage of such advanced technologies will mean “in the long term, more supply, no doubt about it [through] more exploration success and more recovery from existing fields”.

Brinded cited Saudi Arabia and Oman as examples of Middle Eastern countries where innovative techniques to explore and produce oil more efficiently are being used. State-owned Saudi Aramco “can be credited as the largest user of smart fields technology,” he said, referring to the real-time monitoring, model updating and control of oil wells.

Shell’s first foray into smart fields occurred in the late 1960s at High Island 160, in the shallow Gulf of Mexico waters off the Texas coast. “With this first application, we were really interested in automating and controlling certain rudimentary functions in the surface production facilities. We were using vacuum tube technology there, and we had the whole bottom floor of one of the employee quarters buildings full of all this vacuum tube equipment,” says Charlie Williams, Shell’s Chief Scientist for Well Engineering and Production.

Smart fields began to evolve as engineers realised that more could be done than just simple automation. “Much of our onshore production in West Texas and New Mexico was on beam pump artificial lift,” Williams continued. “It was quite apparent that there was much opportunity to not only computer-control, but also to computer-optimise, our operations. So we put in control systems that allowed us to optimise production from each artificial lift well and do automatic well tests.”

It has meant less – and better – holes in the ground, like the snake wells that debuted at the Brunei oilfields in 2003. The first was at the Iron Duke brownfield, in which a snake well was drilled through an area that was 28 m thick, 2 km long and 300 m wide. In addition, the drilled well had to avoid a nearby layer of natural gas whose pressure drove oil to the producing well. It yielded a 15 percent increase in production and delayed water breakthrough by two years.

Such demanding projects are only the beginning. In the future, the exploration and production industry will need all the skills it can muster to handle the ultra-deepwater, where much of the industry’s future lies. Once again, technology has heard our cry – it is already proving its worth offshore through floating production systems, surface blowout prevention drilling, the truss spar and ‘subsea to beach’, aimed at increasing subsea tie-back distance and smart well and field technologies.

This collective ability points to an optimistic future for the offshore industry. We have achieved remarkable results over the years, and we’re far from done.