Why Canadian Oil Field Service Companies are the most cost effective solution providers in the world

WCSB Summary – Geological Challenges

The Western Canadian Sand Basin (WCSB) covers four provinces and the NWT, with Alberta being central, it is almost entirely blanketed with sediments aging from Devonian to Cenozoic periods. Depositional environments are diverse including all carbonate and clastic lithology type. From the early 1920s the present day there has been over 650,000 well drilled in Western Canada, which makes it one of the largest compilation of geological history.
   
It was not until the late 1980s that horizontal drilling technology created new opportunities allowing operators to increase recovery factors in all reservoir types. Although open pit mining began in the 60s and 70s, it was not until horizontal drilling technology was perfected, that recovery schemes like steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) or Cyclic Steam Stimulation (CSS) allowed economic production of bitumen within the McMurray and Clearwater unconsolidated sandstones.

The initial challenge of sand control was the biggest hurdle to overcome, hence engineering products such as wirewrap screens, and slotted liners designs were used as a method to prevent quartz grains from entering the wellbore and causing continual pump failures. A recent development in slotted liner products, like Regent’s roll top TRS liners, offers a low cost method of sand control allowing operators to recover as much as 70% of the original oil in place, with initial rates of sand free production exceeding 1000 barrels of oil per day with a range of 2.5:1 to 4:1 steam oil ratios depending on the recovery type chosen.
 
Horizontal Drilling and Associated Technologies
The support networks for EOR have developed mainstream products which were designed, tested and implemented throughout Heavy Oil and Bitumen recovery schemes.

Even though they could drill these reserves using the latest in directional and horizontal drilling technology, reservoir and production departments within oil companies identified the need for optimizing their production index. With the institution of multiple design disciplines covering thermal projects like SAGD & CSS it was apparent that the sand control problems were hindering economical production of these reserves. Sand Control discussions and proposals in the late 1990’s would open any door in any oil company at any time.

That’s when we formed Regent and started our work with the Alberta Government’s Department of Energy manufacturing sand control liners that would retain the most difficult sand with a more robust design than the wire wrap screens used to date. Wire wrap were difficult to installation and many of the early wells were producing sand on start up because they become damaged upon installation. If it wasn’t for these early learning’s we would not be where we are today, as always failure is the best road to success.

In particular, over the last 7 years, the market has expanded on CSS completion designs in the areas of steam distribution, sand control and special thermal liner hangers. We are proud to say that Regent has been the leader in this area and continue to expand our knowledge base with every well we complete. Failure means progress in this part of the world and without those tough lesions how could we become the best in the world.

Staying within the Tech Cycle

This does not mean Alberta producers were not without our criticisms for making money out of lower class reserves – squeezing cash out of sand seams to most outsiders like so much work for very little payout; however as time has proven, these exploits are now profitable if designed right, executed on time and on budget. There is no room for excuses; “just do it” is the Alberta way. As service company’s, we are expected to deliver low cost solutions in order to make these vast heavy oil reservoirs profitable!

The Heavy Oil Family Circle
Born into the patch is a competitive nature that breads innovation with a relentless expectation to succeed. Don’t sit on your rear end because when a problem arises, take it on fully and completely, you will find a way to resolution and if your solving someone’s problems you always have work.

Team work is prevalent in Alberta heavy oil and especially in thermal Bitumen projects. What typically happens with teams? Well, they want to win and with this competitiveness a charge for more cost effective solutions emerges from drilling practices to surface facilities. We have a good head start and once again we are being invited throughout the world to establish the “New Best Practices” within the heavy oil production markets.

The Technology behind technology
Capturing good data becomes the route most businesses seek to create their innovative power. Terms like “data mining” and “collaborative data pooling” were used at every coffee shop in Calgary in the 1990s. This spawned many great oil field software companies whose primary focus was data gathering, presentation, manipulation and analysis. From geophysical to reservoir modeling, form sand prediction to inflow analysis the data available for interpretation was abound.

Don’t be scared to move laterally or outside of your knowledge base to gather data on all of the problems the customer deals with. Many times, one technology solves a deficiency and it ends up creating different problems for other systems down the line? Knowing everything is impossible but seeking good data is well worth the time and cost when proposing long term solutions.
 
It is a “Mirror Effect”, look and act like your customer so as to completely understand what is driving his decisions. It is the only way to practice the partnership approach with the end users. It has worked in Alberta and it is now working in other parts of the heavy oil world. It is a very good time to be a Canadian Oil Field Service company. Word of mouth only works when your history supports the success you’ve experienced.

Knowing when to bring in others
Collaborative strategies for implementing practical tactical solutions means a cross pollination of technologies is often used. In our market we encourage working with companies that often sell competing products. These eclectic development strategies have forced the “sharing” of engineering data and more importantly the failure mechanisms of previous practices. In order to predict the future one must completely understand the past.

The Canadian Middle East Connection
There are many reasons for the Canadian service companies to introduce their products to the Middle East operators. If we can transfer these completion technologies as we have done already in the Oman, as well as South America and Mexico the Middle East producers can improve their production and their economics.

Canadian Sand Control is of paramount importance to Heavy oil Producers in the Middle East

We proposed our cost effective completion strategies to the Middle East and West Coast Africa back in 2003/2004. It only took 2 years to change the mind set and now companies like Occidental and PDO are experiencing great success implementing our Canadian completion technologies.

Slotting technology has been improved dramatically in the last 10 years and the Canadian producers have benefited from this evolution. This latest completion technology has been used almost everywhere in the world on a trial basis. It can certainly be introduced into the rest of the Middle East and that is why Regent has targeted this market as one of the most important in the world. We want to bring the spirit of Canadian development, eclectic work ethic and years of innovation to our Oil Producing colleagues.

Please click here to download the following White Paper: The Evolution of SAGD Technology at East Senlac.