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D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5 V O L U M E 6 7, N U M B E R 1 2 JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY
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CONTENTS
Volume 67 Number 12

18 GUEST EDITORIAL TREATING PRODUCED WATER

WITHUNDERSTANDING
The fundamental principles covering the treatment of produced water
are becoming increasingly important in the production of hydrocarbon
resources. Understanding how produced water contaminants and water
quality determine mechanical and chemical treatment options, along with
capital and operating costs, is essential.

37 IMPROVING SHALE PRODUCTION THROUGH

FLOWBACKANALYSIS
Companies and researchers are investigating the many different ways in
which the flowback stage can be analyzed and controlled to yield cheaper
and better-performing horizontal wells.

43 DRILLING WELLS EVER FASTER MAY NOT BE THE

MEASURE OF SUCCESS
The metric for drilling efficiency in unconventional plays has been speed,
but the savings from further reductions in the days needed to create
wellbores may be small compared with the long-term cost of poor quality
Drillpipe laid next to a rig in the
holes. The tradeoffs are hard to measure, but some are working on
Horn River Basin of British Columbia,
quantifying the impact of crooked holes. Canada, where shale producers are
using different flowback analysis
48 Q&A strategies to improve fracture designs
Mikhail Chertenkov, deputy chief executive officer of field development and accelerate the learning curve.
technology with Lukoil-Engineering, describes his companys current Photo courtesy of Nexen Energy.
projects and technology applications.

50 UPSTREAM OPPORTUNITIES IN NORTH AFRICA DEPEND

ON ADVANCED TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE
The SPE North Africa Technical Conference and Exhibition held recently
in Cairo focused on Egypt and the opportunities offered there despite
thegeopolitical risks. DEPARTMENTS
52 MANAGEMENT SUBSEA CONDITION MONITORING: 6 Performance Indices
DOES EFFECTIVE DIAGNOSIS INCREASE AVAILABILITY? 8 Regional Update
The challenges encountered in deepwater development have led to the
10 Company News
use of increasingly complex subsea systems. Consequently, operators
have become more reliant on subsea monitoring equipment and 12 Presidents Column
instrumentation to provide field information for understanding production 16 Comments
and equipment conditions. 22 Technology Applications
26 Technology Update
30 E&P Notes
91 SPE News
92 People
93 Professional Services
95 Advertisers Index
96 SPE Events

An Official Publication of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Printed in US. Copyright 2015, Society of Petroleum Engineers.
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56 RESERVES/ASSET MANAGEMENT you the
Greg Horton, SPE, Retired, and Barbara Pribyl, SPE, Reserves and
Resources Manager, Santos superpowers
57 Chance of Development: Definition, Estimation, and Use
60 Aligning Diverse Portfolios and Execution for Capital Efficiency
youve
62 Applying Lessons Learned To Minimize Overall Investment in
Unconventional Plays
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66 A Technical-Limits Approach Applied To Maximizing Gasfield Recovery dreamed of.
69 PRODUCTION AND FACILITIES Introducing the worlds
Ted Frankiewicz, SPE, Engineering Advisor, SPEC Services
first X-Ray technology
70 Optimized Design of Autonomous Inflow-Control Devices for Gas for oil wells.
and Water Coning
VISURAYs revolutionary VR90
72 Deployment of a Remote Acoustic Monitoring System for not only finds downhole blockages
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74 A Study of Wettability-Alteration Methods With Nanomaterials reconstructions of the obstruction.
Application Well illuminate the problem, youll
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76 BIT TECHNOLOGY AND BOTTOMHOLE ASSEMBLIES youll eliminate downtime and
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77 Designing and Testing of New Rotary-Steerable System for Use Onshore
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79 Hydraulic Percussion Drilling System Boosts Rate of Penetration,
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81 Rotation by Reciprocation Casing-Landing Technology

83 WATER MANAGEMENT
Syed A. Ali, SPE, Technical Adviser, Schlumberger

84 First Reuse of 100% Produced Water in Hybrid Treatments With

GellingAgents

87 Permian Basin Fracturing Systems Using Produced Water

89 Water Management: Lessons Learned and Considerations
for a Shale Play in Argentina

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VISURAY X-RAY VIS

The complete SPE technical papers featured in this issue are available
free to SPE members for two months at www.spe.org/jpt.
 PRODUCTION OPTIMIZATION CONSULTING

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Drilling & Formation Evaluation | Well Construction | Completion & Stimulation | Production

POC Comps.indd 3 10/13/15 1:25 PM


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OFFICERS
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Helge Hove Haldorsen, Statoil
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Vice President Finance
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GULF COAST NORTH AMERICA
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MID-CONTINENT NORTH AMERICA
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MIDDLE EAST
Vacant
NORTH SEA
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NORTHERN ASIA PACIFIC
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 PERFORMANCE INDICES

WORLD CRUDE OIL PRODUCTION1+ HENRY HUB GULF COAST NATURAL GAS SPOT PRICE

THOUSAND BOPD
6
O PEC JAN FEB MAR APR
Algeria 1370 1370 1370 1370 5 USD/million Btu
Angola 1860 1810 1760 1810 4
Ecuador 558 553 553 548
3
Iran 3300 3300 3300 3350
Iraq 3525 3425 3825 3861 2
Kuwait* 2550 2650 2650 2650
1
Libya 370 360 475 505

2014
NOV

DEC

2015
JAN

FEB

MAR

APR

MAY

JUN

JUL

AUG

SEP

OCT
Nigeria 2470 2470 2420 2520
Qatar 1514 1520 1525 1531
Saudi Arabia* 9640 9740 9940 9940
UAE 2820 2820 2820 2820 WORLD CRUDE OIL PRICES (USD/bbl)
Venezuela 2500 2500 2500 2500

TOTAL 32477 32518 33138 33405 MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT
Brent 55.89 59.52 64.08 61.48 56.56 46.52 47.62 48.43

THOUSAND BOPD WTI 47.82 54.45 59.26 59.82 50.90 42.87 45.48 46.22

NON-OPEC JAN FEB MAR APR

Argentina 533 529 531 533
Australia 337 314 249 299 WORLD ROTARY RIG COUNT
Azerbaijan 847 847 847 852
Brazil 2469 2431 2413 2394 REGION APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT
Canada 3879 3901 3770 3910 US 976 889 861 866 883 848 791
China 4232 4218 4254 4258 Canada 90 80 129 183 206 183 184
Colombia 1035 1029 1023 1028 Latin America 325 327 314 313 319 321 294
Denmark 158 161 153 163 Europe 119 116 113 108 109 109 108
Egypt 508 516 525 519 Middle East 410 398 401 391 393 396 403
Eq. Guinea 249 249 249 249 Africa 120 100 103 94 96 96 93
Gabon 215 215 215 205 Asia Pacific 228 217 215 212 220 218 213
India 767 766 776 751
TOTAL 2268 2127 2136 2167 2226 2171 2086
Indonesia 792 792 797 823
Kazakhstan 1692 1670 1660 1650
Malaysia 680 693 697 675
WORLD OIL SUPPLY AND DEMAND2
Mexico 2290 2370 2356 2235
Norway 1588 1599 1596 1622 MILLION BOPD 2014 2015
Oman 960 958 977 960 Quarter 4th 1st 2nd 3rd
Russia 10220 10150 10050 10020
SUPPLY 95.03 94.44 95.41 96.35
Sudan 257 257 257 257
DEMAND 93.25 92.85 93.37 94.70
Syria 26 26 26 26
UK 872 813 868 947
USA 9305 9432 9692 9701
INDICES KEY
Vietnam 348 341 338 325 + Figures do not include NGLs and oil from nonconventional sources.
Yemen 113 113 93 78 * Includes approximately one-half of Neutral Zone production.

Other 2465 2457 2499 2458 1 Latest available data on www.eia.gov.

2 Includes crude oil, lease condensates, natural gas plant liquids, other hydrocarbons for refinery feedstocks,
Total 46837 46847 46911 46938 refinery gains, alcohol, and liquids produced from nonconventional sources.

Total World 79314 79365 80049 80343 Source: Baker Hughes.

Source: US Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration.

6 JPT DECEMBER 2015

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 REGIONAL UPDATE
AFRICA
Z The drillship Ocean Rig Athena is
preparing to drill appraisal and exploration
wells offshore Senegal for a joint venture
(JV) led by Cairn Energy. Two wells will
appraise the SNE discovery, which was
ranked by IHS CERA as the worlds largest
for oil last year. An exploration well will
also be drilled in the Bellatrix prospect, for
which mapping has indicated a potential
168 million bbl of oil resources. Cairn holds
a 40% interest in the JV, with remaining
interests held by ConocoPhillips (35%),
FAR (15%), and Petrosen (10%).
Z The Ksiri West-A exploration well
drilled by Circle Oil on the Sebou permit
onshore Morocco has flowed gas at a rate
of 8MMcf/D following tests. Reaching a
total depth of 6,200 ft, the well perforated
its primary Main Hoot target interval from
5,964 ft to 5,993 ft. It is being readied for
production. Circle holds a 75% interest
in the permit and Office National des
Hydrocarbures et des Mines holds the
remaining 25% interest.
ASIA
Z Indian Oil Corp. said it had allocated
USD5 billion over the next 5 to 7 years
to expand its exploration and production
business to capitalize on the more
affordable prices for upstream assets
resulting from lower oil prices. The
largest refiner and fuel retailer in India,
the company plans to participate in
international and domestic auctions of
hydrocarbon acreage.
Z OMV discovered natural gas at the
Latif South-1 well in the Latif exploration
license in Pakistan. During testing,
the well flowed at a rate of 15 MMcf/D
(2,500BOEPD). Appraisal work is needed
to confirm the size of the discovery. OMV
holds a 33.4% interest in the license with
Pakistan Petroleum and Eni each holding
33.3%interest.
Z An industry report cited by Sinopec
estimated that proved reserves have
nearly tripled at the Fuling project, the
largest shale gas discovery in China. The
report said that newly proved reserves
for the Jiaoshiba block in the Chongqing
municipality of southwest China total
273.8billion m3. The estimate would raise
Fulings proved reserves figure certified
8 JPT DECEMBER 2015
by the Ministry of Land and Resources
to380.6billion m3.
AUSTRALIA/OCEANIA
Z Pilot Energy said that an independent
audit of prospective oil resources for its
WA-507-P exploration permit offshore
Western Australia has confirmed the
potential for multimillion-barrel oil
discoveries. The audit findings by
Gaffney, Cline & Associates supplement
Pilots previous announcement of a
confirmed potential for multi-Tcf natural
gas discoveries in the permit, located
in the Carnarvon Basin. Pilot holds an
80% working interest in the permit,
and Black Swan Resources holds the
remaininginterest.
Z The first cargo of liquefied natural gas
(LNG) from the Gladstone LNG project
in Australia has been delivered to Korea
Gas (Kogas). Operated by Santos, the
Queensland-based project produces natural
gas from coal seams and converts it to
LNG for shipment to buyers, mostly in Asia.
Santos holds a 30% interest in the project
with the other interests held by Petronas
(27.5%), Total (27.5%), and Kogas (15%).
EUROPE
Z Lukoil discovered a natural gas field
in the Trident block (EX-30) offshore
Romania. The Lira 1X well was drilled
to an 8,858-ft depth by the deepwater
semisubmersible GSF Development
DrillerII and has been temporarily
abandoned for the evaluation of the
discovery. Seismic data have suggested
that the field could hold more than 1.05 Tcf
of gas reserves. Lukoil holds a 72% interest
in the project with the other interests
held by PanAtlantic Petroleum (18%) and
Societatea Nationale de Gaze Naturale
Romgaz (10%).
Z UK Oil & Gas Investments (UKOG)
said that a study has calculated a gross
best estimate of 15.7 billion bbl of oil in
place (OIP) to lie in three Jurassic shale
and interbedded limestone tight oil plays
underlying the companys license areas
in the Weald Basin. Reservoir intelligence
firm Nutech reported that a net OIP
estimate of 3.9billion bbl is attributable to
UKOGs eight license interests in the basin
in southern England. OIP calculations are
not reserves estimates. Further study is
needed to assess the recoverability of oil
from the basin and the rate of recovery.
MIDDLE EAST
Z Gulf Keystone Petroleum (GKP)
said the gross proved and probable
reserves atitsShaikan oil field in the
Kurdistan Region of Iraq is estimated to
be 639millionbbl. The estimate is more
than double the previous gross estimate
of 299millionbbl. Discovered in 2009, the
field is considered to have the potential to
produce 100,000B/D. The independent
report findings could help GKP lower its
field development costs.
NORTH AMERICA
Z Noble Energys Big Bend and Dantzler
field projects in the US Gulf of Mexico
moved toward startup by year-end as 8-in.
steel catenary risers, eight 100-ton subsea
structures, and 40 miles of pipe-in-pipe
flowlines were installed by EMAS AMC. In
water depths ranging from about 6,600ft
to 7,300 ft, the fields will be subsea tiebacks
to the Murphy-operated Thunder Hawk
semisubmersible platform in Mississippi
Canyon Block734. Noble holds working
interests of 54% in Big Bend and 45% in
Dantzler. Gross combined production is
expected to reach 40,000BOEPD.
SOUTH AMERICA
Z Petrobras said that a third exploratory
well found light oil in the Carcara offshore
discovery in the Santos Basin offshore
Brazil, confirming that the find extends well
beyond the initial discovery. The Carcara
NW well lies 5.5 km (3.4 miles) northwest of
the initial discovery well and was drilled to
a depth of 2 km. When discovered in 2012,
Carcara was the biggest oil column ever
found in Brazils pre-salt region. Petrobras,
the operator, holds a 66% interest in the
area with the remaining interests held by
Galp Energia (14%), Barra Energia do Brasil
Petroleo e Gas (10%), and Queiroz Galvao
Exploracao e Producao (10%).
Z Compania General de Combustibles
(CGC) discovered a natural gas deposit in
the Santa Cruz province of Argentina. The
Morena Sur well tested at an initial rate of
3.5 MMcf/D. The company estimates that
the discovery could increase its reserves in
the Austral Basin of Patagonia by 40 Bcf
to50 Bcf. JPT
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S142453US.0715
 COMPANY NEWS
MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS
Petsec Energy has completed the
acquisition of the participating interests
of Mitsui E&P Middle East (8.5%) and
AWE (21.25 %) in Block 7 of the Al Barqa
permit in Yemen. The block is an onshore
exploration permit covering 5000 km2
located approximately 340 km east of
Sanaa, the capital. It contains the Al Meashar
oil discovery and an inventory of leads
and prospects with significant oil potential
as defined by 2D and 3D seismic surveys.
Oil Search (34%) remains the operator of
the block, with the other interests held by
Petsec Energy Yemen (29.75%), KUFPEC
(Aden) (21.25%), and the Yemen General
Corporation for Oil and Gas (15%).
Total has signed an agreement to sell
a 15% interest in the Gina Krog field in the
Norwegian North Sea to Tellus Petroleum
for USD 172 million (NOK 1.4 billion). The
field is expected to come on stream in 2017,
and produce 60,000 BOPD and 9 million m3
of gas per day. Following the closure of the
transaction, Total will retain a 15% interest
in the field, Tellus (15%), PGNiG Upstream
International (8%), and Det norske
oljeselskap (3.3%). Statoil is the operator
ofthe field and holds a 58.7% stake.
AziLat Petroleum has entered into a
transaction with OGX Petroleo e Gas to
acquire OGXs full interest in two blocks
offshore Brazil. The blocks, CE-M-603 and
POT-M-475, are located in the Ceara Basin
and the Potiguar Basin, respectively, in
the Equatorial Conjugate Margin and are
operated by ExxonMobil Exploracao Brasil.
Following the completion of the transaction,
AziLat will control 50% participating
interest in the first block and 65% in the
second block, with ExxonMobil holding the
remaining interest.
Infosys will acquire Houston-based
Noah Consulting, an advanced information
management consulting services company
for the oil and gas industry, in a cash deal
worth USD 70 million. The new acquisition
will combine Noahs industry knowledge,
information strategy planning, data
governance, and architecture capabilities
with Infosys ability to provide technology
and outsourcing services on a global
scale to oil and gas customers. The sale
is expected to close before the end of the
third quarter of next year.
10
E.ON has signed an agreement to sell
all its shares in E.ON E&P Norge in Norway
to DEA Deutsche Erdoel. The transaction
value is USD 1.6 billion, including
USD100million in cash on the balance
sheet effective January this year. E.ON
E&P Norge holds the Norwegian portfolio
of E.ONs oil and gas upstream business in
the North Sea and controls equity interests
in 43 licenses including a 28% interest in
the Skarv field and a 30% interest in the
Njordfield.
Det norske oljeselskap has entered
into an agreement to acquire Svenska
Petroleum Exploration for a cash
consideration of USD 75 million on a cash-
free, debt-free basis. Svenska holds 13
licenses in Norway, including interests in
the Krafla/Askja (25%), Garantiana (20%),
Frigg Gamma Delta (40%), and Fulla/
Lille-Frigg (25%) discoveries in the North
Sea. In addition, the company holds four
exploration licenses in the Norwegian Sea.
The transaction is expected to close in the
first quarter of next year.
CONTRACTS
2H Offshore has been awarded
a contract by Chevron to manage a
production riser weld qualification testing
program. The development of 20,000-psi
technology is aimed at qualifying the
equipment required to develop future
offshore fields with design pressures
above 15,000 psi and temperatures above
250F. The program will incorporate test
pipe specifications, procurement and
qualification of new welding and automated
ultrasonic testing procedures, and
comprehensive fatiguetesting.
Technip Umbilicals and Angoflex have
been awarded a contract by Eni to supply
umbilicals to its East Hub development
project in Block 15/06, offshore Angola.
The contract covers project management
and manufacture of approximately 15 km
of dynamic and static steel tube umbilicals
for the field, which is located 350 km north
of Luanda in water depths of 450 m to
600m. The manufacturing of the umbilicals
is set to be completed in the second half of
nextyear.
Qatar Petroleum awarded a contract
to McDermott International for the
engineering, procurement, construction, and
installation of four wellhead jackets at Bul-
Hanine field offshore Doha. McDermott is set
to install two jackets by December of next
year, with the two remaining installations by
July 2017. The jackets will be fabricated at
the firms facility in Dubai.
Wood Group was awarded a contract
by Bechtel to provide an automation
solution consisting of detailed engineering,
control hardware, and remote instrument
enclosures for Tengizchevroils crude
storage capacity project at the Tengiz field
in Kazakhstan. The project will increase the
capacity of the tank farm to accommodate
the upgrading of the existing tank farm.
Siemens has signed a long-term
agreement with gas company Dolphin
Energy to support its Dolphin gas project in
Qatar, which supplies gas to UAE and Oman
by pipeline from the North field in Qatar. In
the deal, Siemens will provide service and
maintenance for nine aeroderivative gas
turbines and nine compressors for 18 years.
Saudi Aramco has awarded Saipem a
contract for the engineering, procurement,
construction, and installation of structures
at the Karan field, offshore Saudi Arabia.
The structures are the observation platform,
wellhead production deck module, auxiliary
platforms, 20-in. internally cladded flowline,
and composite power cable.
Technip USA and 3D at Depth have
signed a joint development agreement
to expand and commercialize the Light
Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology
for subsea metrology, field survey, and
inspection, repair, and maintenance
(IRM) applications. Known as laser
scanning, the LiDAR technology collects
precise 3D models of subsea structures
and seabed topography, and helps
address the challenges of subsea data
collection and imaging in deep waters for
metrology survey programs and as-built
fieldconfiguration.
Eni awarded Saipem a contract for the
engineering, procurement, construction, and
installation for its East Hub development
project in Block 15/06 offshore Angola.
The contract includes the provision of five
flexible risers and 20 km of rigid flowlines,
and the installation of subsea umbilicals,
risers, and flowlines. The project is set for
completion by the end of next year. JPT
JPT DECEMBER 2015
 Manara
PRODUCTION AND RESERVOIR
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Water cut
Fluid flow rate
Pressure
Water cut Temperature
Fluid flow rate
Pressure
Temperature

Increase production and manage inflow with

real-time information and control in every zone.
With patented inductive coupler technology that provides power and telemetry, the Manara* production and reservoir
management system can be deployed in conventional or extended-reach wells, in two or more sections, or across any
number of lateral junctionsall with a single control line. Using the Manara system to monitor and control previously
unattainable zones, operators can now immediately identify problematic areas, pinpoint the cause, and make the
necessary adjustments to maintain the well at optimal production.

Find out more at

slb.com/manara

*Mark of Schlumberger. Copyright 2015 Schlumberger. All rights reserved. 15-CO-41442

Manara JPT October, November, and December 2015 15-CO-41442 AD.indd 1 9/14/15 8:45 AM
 IMPROVING PEOPLES LIVES
The Perfect Day
Nathan Meehan, 2016 SPE President
What constitutes a perfect day? It
depends. To a surfer, it is a day of warm
sunshine and perfect waves. To sports
fans, perhaps a great win by their favorite
team. We each have our own idea of what
makes a perfect day.
Another aspect of a perfect day may
not be a conscious thought but is of ut-
most importance: arriving home safely at the end of the day.
Last month, I wrote about how the Society of Petroleum En-
gineers (SPE) mission statement reflects the role of the Society
and its members in serving the public benefit. This month, let
us discuss how we are going beyond statements to actions to im-
prove peoples lives by not only enabling affordable energy, but
also by doing it in the healthiest, safest, and most environmen-
tally responsible way possible.
HSE: An Evolving Approach
When I started my career, the topic of health, safety, and envi-
ronment (HSE) was often seen as a regulatory obligation to
meet government requirements. HSE is now recognized as the
right thing to do for two very important reasons.
1.It is part of our moral and ethical responsibility to our em-
ployees, customers, contractors, the communities in which
we work, and to the future of our planet.
2.HSE is good for business. There is no downside to good
HSE practices. Conversely, the cost of poor practices can
drive companies out of business.
More organizations are striving to eliminate or significantly
reduce HSE incident occurrences. This trend in performance
improvements over the past decade has plateaued. We need
a breakthrough. This will not occur overnight; it will require
ajourney.
Getting to Zero
SPE has a long commitment to HSE and I strongly encour-
age you to visit its website at spe.org/hsenow. This free web-
site for HSE professionals is an informative public resource.
HSE is a growing discipline within SPE globally. OnePetro
(www.onepetro.org) now has 6,000 published HSE papers.
As the number of professionals sharing knowledge on HSE
increases, SPE offers the ideal place where they can gath-
er, access resources, increase learning, and collaborate to
improve industry practices.
To contact the SPE President, email president@spe.org.
12
The SPE journey to an incident-free workplace began with
a forum titled Getting to ZeroAn Incident-Free Workplace:
How Do We Get There? Sessions addressed defining zero as
zero HSE incident occurrences, management systems and met-
rics; understanding and developing a safety culture; stakehold-
ers and their roles and importance; and taking the risk out of
the work process.
Based on the success of the forum, a workshop was held in
Houston in 2011 to enable more open sharing of information
with 90 attendees from 10 countries and 55 companies. Out-
comes of this workshop included identifying the top three in-
fluencing factors for getting to zero:
Having leadership commitment and engagement
Creating a culture of perfection
Having a common language of communication
Identifying these factors focused efforts on the desired out-
come. It also provided a framework for ongoing discussion on
three provoking questions for shaping exploration and pro-
duction (E&P) industry HSE management going forward.
1. How can leadership be effected and implemented?
2. What is a culture of perfection? How can it be achieved?
3. What does a common HSE language consist of and how
does it gain acceptance?
On 30 June, the journey to zero was re-energized with the
first in a series of global interactive sessions called Getting
to ZeroThe Road to Stavanger. I participated in this event
via the web and was impressed at how well the web event and
the live presentation in Houston were integrated. A second
session was conducted in September in Stavanger, a third in
October in Kuala Lumpur, and a fourth in Rio de Janeiro in De-
cember. Conversations will also take place in the Middle East,
along with follow-up sessions in the United States. These ses-
sions will culminate with an interactive workshop in April
2016 in Stavanger, prior to the biennial SPE International
Conference and Exhibition on Health, Safety, Security, Envi-
ronment, and Social Responsibility.
These interactive sessions include in-room and online pre-
sentations and questions and answers with real-time polling
of all participants. They will address the following questions:
Is getting to zero achievable?
What are the most critical values to achieving zero?
Which issues need more time?
We have an early consensus that achieving zero HSE inci-
dent occurrences is possible. The most critical core values, as
JPT DECEMBER 2015
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 identified in the initial sessions, are visible leadership, team-
work, and openness to change. Top influencing components
needing more time and effort include a total alignment of all
stakeholders in relation to a vision of zero, human behaviors
and a common language of communication.
Getting From Words to Action
Lao Tzu was an ancient Chinese philosopher who is credited
with writing the classic text, the Tao Te Ching. In it, he wrote
, which is translated as The journey of
a thousand miles begins with a single step. Many cultures share
the recognition that significant change cannot take place until
action is taken to bring it about.
My employer has taken that first step on the journey to zero
by revolutionizing the way the company manages HSE with
the concept of a perfect day which equates to no injuries,
no accidents, and no spills. Jack Hinton, vice president of HSE
at Baker Hughes, participates in all of the Getting to Zero
interactive sessions. When Hinton introduces his section of
the program, he asks the audience to reconsider the con-
cept of needing more time to address issues critical to achiev-
ing zero.
We talk about needing more time, but do we really need
more time, or is it more about needing to do something differ-
ent, and needing to do it now? asks Hinton.
This was the question facing Baker Hughes in 2009. We had
made significant progress in standard HSE measures but it is
hard for an employee to relate to a total recordable injury rate.
What we did redefined who we were and how we did business,
including how we manage HSE. We made a decision to reorga-
nize from a number of companies made up of product lines and
services to a single company with an interdependent culture.
As part of this culture, we stated our purpose: enabling safe,
affordable energy, and improving peoples lives. This purpose
is defining; it is within the DNA of the people who make up
the company.
As Hinton says, When you have a purpose, you really do not
have more time. The time is now.
Safety is as much our purpose as energy is, so we made it in-
tegral to the company and outlined a business framework for it,
as we did for other key aspects of the business.
The Perfect HSE Day
Like most companies, Baker Hughes was comfortable measuring
HSE performance incrementally. Our journey caused us to fun-
damentally shift such that we were no longer happy with incre-
mental improvement. Our employees wanted more, and our
leadership supported it. Getting to zero became a reflection of
who we already were, rather than a new initiative.
The perfect HSE day embodied our definition of zero and all
that was necessary to achieve it: engaged and visible leadership,
teamwork, trust, willingness to change, a culture of perfection,
andextremely importanta common vocabulary of HSE.
The perfect HSE day that everyone throughout the organization
14
could understand would require changing the conversation and
changing the vocabulary.
We began with an internal communications campaign that
included videos, testimonials, conversations, posters, a Web
page, and resource materials designed to make getting to zero
more meaningful and to help employees at all levels embrace it
as much as possible. The perfect HSE day was defined as a day in
which everyone in the company goes home safe, with no record-
able injuries, no seriousmotor vehicle accidents, and no signifi-
cant environmental spills. We began to measure and track per-
fect HSEdays.
Everyone shares one simple metric for measuring suc-
cessno acronyms, no jargon, and no incident rates. There
is one simple number: zero. Each day is a new opportunity to
achieve it. Everyone in the company can see how their actions
impact the company and its outcomes. On every day that we
record a perfect day, each employee receives an email from
our chief executive officer. It is the email I most look forward
to eachday.
Results have been remarkable. In 2012, the company logged
22 perfect HSE days. In 2013, the number improved to 42. In
2014, the total was 92, the equivalent of a perfect quarter. On
6 October 2015 we crossed the 100 perfect HSE Days mile-
stone. Many of our operating units have recorded a year or
more of consecutive perfectdays.
Uncertainty and anxiety surrounding market conditions
and other potential distractions have historically result-
edinHSE incident rates trending up. We are seeing theopposite.
Moving Forward on the Journey
As part of our goal of making every day a perfect HSE day, we
mine the wealth of information we have on any incident that
occurs. We have identified five basic issues common to every
incident, regardless of classification.
1. Hazard identification: What hazards might I face while per-
forming this task?
2. Hazard control: How can I control the hazards to avoid
being injured?
3. Process education: Am I properly trained and do I under-
stand the task?
4. Change management: What is outside my normal scope
ofwork?
5. Sharing lessons learned: How can I share what I have
learned with my coworkers?
Learnings are fed back into the HSE incident management
system for future use. We are unsatisfied with being able to clas-
sify incidents and determine why they happened; we must fix
them so they do not happen again.
This is not a campaign; it is a progression in our thinking. It
has evolved into the way we do business. It can become the way
business is done throughout the E&P sector. That is where we are
heading. That is what we can accomplish when we envision every
employee as an HSE professional. That is how we will get to zero.
That is the perfect day. JPT
JPT DECEMBER 2015
 COMMENTS EDITORIAL COMMITTEE
Bernt Aadny, University of Stavanger
Syed AliChairperson, Schlumberger
Tayfun Babadagli, University of Alberta

The IEAs Prediction

William Bailey, Schlumberger
Ian G. Ball, Intecsea (UK) Ltd
Mike Berry, Mike Berry Consulting
John Donnelly, JPT Editor
Maria Capello, Kuwait Oil Company
Simon Chipperfield, Santos
Nicholas Clem, Baker Hughes
The International Energy Agencys (IEA) new energy outlook Alex Crabtree, Hess Corporation
paints a generally optimistic view of the supply/demand balance Gunnar DeBruijn, Schlumberger
and oil price picture to 2020. The annual report is one of the
Alexandre Emerick,
most widely watched and respected energy forecasts. Petrobras Research Center
The IEAs World Energy Outlook 2015 offers two possible sce- Niall Fleming, Statoil
narios for the near future: a tightening supply/demand balance Ted Frankiewicz, SPEC Services
that leads to oil prices rising to around USD 80/bbl by 2020, and
Emmanuel Garland, Total
a less optimistic view that has oil in the USD 5060/bbl range
Stephen Goodyear, Shell
5years from now. Here are the highlights of the report:
Reid Grigg, New Mexico Petroleum Recovery
The IEAs central scenario sees oil prices gradually rising to USD 80/bbl by 2020
Research Center
and continuing to increase after that. On the demand side, that prediction hinges
Omer M. Gurpinar, Schlumberger
on global consumption increasing by 900,000 B/D per year. The supply side
A.G. Guzman-Garcia, ExxonMobil (retired)
outlook sees declining non-OPEC production as the upstream price cutting that
began this year begins to take hold. Some estimates have companies cutting up to Greg Horton, Consultant

20% of global upstream spending this year. A BP executive last month was quoted John Hudson, Shell

as saying that oil majors have canceled 80 projects this year and cut capital Morten Iversen, BG Group
expenditures by as much as USD 22 billion. Leonard Kalfayan, Hess Corporation
The agency also believes that OPEC cannot indefinitely keep its current strategy Tom Kelly, FMC Technologies
of flooding the market with oil to maintain market share. At some point in the Gerd Kleemeyer, Shell Global Solutions
near future, the loss in oil revenue to OPEC states will not be sustainable. The InternationalBV
IEA is also somewhat skeptical that output growth from Iran and Iraq will not Thomas Knode, Statoil
beachallenge. Marc Kuck, Eni US Operating
Tight oil growth in the US has changed the global oil market because of the short Jesse C. Lee, Schlumberger
investment cycle of tight oil and its ability to respond quickly to price signals. Silviu Livescu, Baker Hughes
That means that when oil prices do recover, growth in the US tight oil sector will
Shouxiang (Mark) Ma, Saudi Aramco
recover with them and, in addition, producers are becoming increasingly adept at
John Macpherson, Baker Hughes
operational efficiency and use of technology. But the sweet spots eventually will
Casey McDonough, Chesapeake Energy
be depleted and operations in less productive areas will lead to higher production
costs. The IEA predicts that US tight oil production will reach a plateau in the Stephane Menand, DrillScan

early 2020s at slightly above 5 million B/D before beginning to decline. Badrul H Mohamed Jan, University of Malaya
A period of lower for longer cannot be ruled out because of the possibility of Lee Morgenthaler, Shell
tepid global economic and oil demand growth, OPECs continuation of its market Michael L. Payne, BP plc
share strategy, and resilient supply from US tight oil and other non-OPEC sources. Zillur Rahim, Saudi Aramco
However, the IEA considers this a less likely scenario. Jon Ruszka, Baker Hughes
Global concern about climate change will continue to have an impact on the oil
Martin Rylance, GWO Completions
and gas industry. Investment and development in alternative energy sources Engineering
is growing, as is support from government subsidies. The industry will come Otto L. Santos, Petrobras
under additional pressure this month during the United Nations Conference Luigi A. Saputelli, Hess Corporation
on Climate Change in Paris. There should be no energy company in the world Sally A. Thomas, ConocoPhillips
[which] believes that climate policies will not affect their business, IEAs
Win Thornton, BP plc
Executive Director Fatih Birol said in November. The conference goal is to reach
Xiuli Wang, Minerva Engineering
a legally binding, global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Earlier this
Mike Weatherl, Well Integrity, LLC
year, 10 major energy companies declared support for a global deal on climate
change, with some recommending that governments agree to carbon pricing as Rodney Wetzel, Chevron ETC

akeystrategy. JPT Scott Wilson, Ryder Scott Company

Jonathan Wylde, Clariant Oil Services
Pat York, Weatherford International
To contact JPTs editor, email jdonnelly@spe.org.

16 JPT DECEMBER 2015

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 GUEST EDITORIAL

Treating Produced Water With Understanding

Daniel Shannon, Produced Water Product Manager, Cameron

desalinization desalinization
The American Petroleum Institute esti- Offshore

Membrane
Ocean
mates that oil and gas exploration and Produced water TDS <40,000 mg/L
production in the US generates approxi-
Onshore Fine Fine
mately 20 billion bbl of produced water Total particle droplet
annually. And, because the production suspended removal removal

Thermal
solids
life of wells is usually advanced, the ratio Porous
formation TDS >40,000 mg/L
of barrels of produced water to hydro- Free oil
carbons recovered can be as high as 9:1. reduction Reinjection
Tight
Accordingly, in the past several formation Fine Fine
particle droplet
decades, produced water has become removal removal
the largest byproduct in the oil and gas
Hot water/steamflood
industry. Managing all this produced Thermal enhanced

Demineralization

Downhole
water includes injecting the water into oil recovery

Desalinization/
the formation to maintain formation Fine Fine
SAGD particle droplet
pressure, thereby increasing hydro- removal removal
carbon production, or disposing of the Hydraulic fracturing. New fluids only (limited treatment).
water in deep wells. Before the water
Disposal well
can be injected, disposed of, or dis- (salt water disposal)
charged offshore, it is necessary to
remove oil, suspended solids, or both to Disposal well
protect formation rheology or to meet
dischargeregulations. A water process engineers initial approach to produced water treatment
If you ask an experienced produced applications and options.
water process engineer working in the
oil and gas industrythey are get- formation and its associated hydrocar- effective and efficient produced water
ting harder to find these dayshow to bons. Plus, the properties of produced treatment strategy.
treat produced water, be prepared to water and its volume vary considerably While an initial analysis could begin
answer a lot of questions. And, these depending on the location of the field, with a number of variables, contami-
are likely to be on a range of topics such its geologic formation, the type of hydro- nants in the water and the water quality
as local operating conditions, charac- carbon product being produced, and the requirements determine the treatment
teristics of the produced water, water reservoirs age. process. Contaminants are generally
treatment requirements, and available For those new to produced water, categorized into three types: suspended
treating options. It is also important to the preceding information can be over- oil droplets/particles, dissolved organics
understand that produced water con- whelming. But for produced water and inorganics, and biological matter.
tains chemical characteristics of the experts, it is the basis for developing an
Free Oil and Suspended Solids
Free oil and suspended solids represent
Daniel Shannon is the produced water product manager for the most common challenges to treat-
Camerons Process Systems division. During his 35-year career, ing produced water. For offshore dis-
Shannon has held senior product management, commercial, and charge, oil removal is necessary to meet
engineering management positions in water treatment at Calgon, local regulations. When water is inject-
Baker Petrolite, GE Water & Process Technologies, and Halliburton. ed, both onshore and offshore, the par-
ticulate threatens the formation rheol-
ogy, well productivity, and well life. Left

18 JPT DECEMBER 2015

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Our core focus is on partnering with and capitalizing oil and gas entrepreneurs
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Contaminant to be Removed
Suspended solids and free oil removal
Fine particulate removal
Oil removal prior to desalination
Fine droplet removal
Desalinationdischarge/agricultural upcycling
Nonoxidizing biocides
Oxidizing biocides
Approximate costs for produced water treatments.
to separate from the water naturally, the
process could take years, making the
method impractical.
The rate of separation of free oil
and suspended solids from produced
water can be accelerated using the
followingmethods:
Increasing oil droplet/solid particle
size
Changing water flow direction
Decreasing water flow velocity
Decreasing oil droplet/particle
density
Increasing the size of droplets/par-
ticles is effected through charge neu-
tralization by adding cations such as
iron or aluminum. Once neutralized,
the oil droplets/particles collide and
stick together in what is termed the
agglomeration process. As the particles
coalesce and form larger aggregates,
their separation speed from the water
increasesgeometrically.
Changing the direction of a produced
water stream containing oil droplets,
particles, or both causes these entrained
contaminants to separate from the water.
By using coalescing media, a stream of
produced water can be forced to change
direction multiple times. This process
can separate the heavier particles and the
lighter oil droplets from the water. The
resulting high coalescence of droplets
and particles increases the collision rate,
causing agglomeration.
Decreasing the velocity of a produced
water stream promotes the separation of
solids and oil. The rate and efficiency at
which this process occurs is dependent
20
Cost Range
USD/bbl
0.20 to 2.50
0.50 to 2.00
0.50 to 1.50
Membrane 3.00 to 5.00 10 to 30 mg/L
Thermal 6.00 to 8.00
Biological programs are often monitored
0.50 to 2.50
based on bug counts. Real metrics are
observation of evidence of biological activity
0.10 to 1.00
such as presence of slime in tanks, etc.
on the droplet/particle size, density, and
the velocity of water.
Decreasing the density of oil droplets/
particles can be accomplished by attach-
ing them to gas bubbles. Decreasing their
densities to a point that is substantially
lower than the produced water in which
they are suspended allows the particles
to rise and separate. It can be done by
injecting gas, producing bubbles that
range in size from 100 and 200 microns,
or by causing a pressure drop that releas-
es dissolved gas bubbles as small as 10
to 20 microns. The oil droplets/particles
entrained in the water will attach to gas
bubbles or be drawn up by the bubbles
lift and rise to the waters surface where
they can be removed with a skimming or
overflow device.
Dissolved Organics
and Inorganics
Dissolved organics and inorganics
include hydrocarbons such as aromat-
ics, and inorganic salts such as calcium
carbonate. These contaminants must be
removed for discharging into the envi-
ronment or upcycling into agricultural
or upstream applications, such as steam-
assisted gravity drainage. Dissolved
organic contaminants can be removed
from produced water by destabilization
and precipitation prior to fine particu-
late removal.
Desalination is the process by which
inorganic salts are removed. Desalina-
tion process technologies are generally
categorized into two types: thermal and
membrane. For produced water with total
TSS Spec Oil Spec
mg/L micron mg/L
10 mg/L <10 25
<5 NTU <2
<1
TDS mg/L
<1 to 10
dissolved solids 40,000mg/L, thermal
desalination technologies, including mul-
tistage evaporators and vapor recompres-
sion, are used. For produced water with
total dissolved solids 40,000 mg/L,
membrane systems areused.
Biological Matter
Biological matter includes bacteria and
all their metabolic byproducts. Bacteria
develop in produced water as a result of
contamination during exploration and
production. Bacteria and their metabol-
ic activity can cause equipment fouling
and failure as well as reservoir damage.
Control of the microbiological commu-
nity in a water system can be sustained
through good housekeeping, which can
substantially reduce the use and expense
of biocides that must also be applied.
Summary
The fundamental principles covering the
treatment of produced water are becom-
ing increasingly important in the pro-
duction of hydrocarbon resources.
Understanding how produced water
contaminants and water quality deter-
mine mechanical and chemical treatment
options, along with capital and operat-
ing costs, is essential. Removing con-
taminants is crucial to maintaining well
productivity, well life, equipment integ-
rity, and sustaining environmental com-
pliance. Expert water process engineers
provide a core competency in the devel-
opment of an effective produced water
management program that optimizes
costs and water quality.JPT
JPT DECEMBER 2015
 Simple is the New Standard

PosiFrac Toe Sleeve

PosiFrac HALO Frac Seat

Two Revolutionary Designs:

Industry Standard Redefined.
TAM developed the PosiFrac Toe Sleeve and the PosiFrac HALO large bore frac
seat to eliminate the need for coiled tubing in a plug-and-perf completion.

The PosiFrac Toe Sleeve is designed to open on bleed down after the high-pressure
casing test. Multiple sleeves can be installed at the toe of the well and can be opened
simultaneously, providing more than one fracture initiation point.

The PosiFrac HALO large bore frac seat has the largest ID of any frac plug on the
market, and it does not require mill-out following plug-and-perf completion operations.
The simple design increases reliability and virtually eliminates the risk of pre-setting
while being pumped to setting depth. Using industry standard wireline setting tools,
the PosiFrac HALO is setting a new standard for plug-and-perf completions.

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 TECHNOLOGY APPLICATIONS
Chris Carpenter, JPT Technology Editor
Mature-Asset Solution
The Baker Hughes DeclineShift solution
for mature assets is designed to help oper-
ators get the most out of their mature
assets through a focus on maximizing cap-
ital efficiency and returns; expertise to
design a customized plan and to execute
it precisely and surgically in the field; and
an innovative technology portfolio that
offers advanced, integrated production-
characterization and -enhancement solu-
tions. The resulting fit-for-purpose solu-
tion is engineered to ensure minimal
disruption, downtime, and footprint
and increased returns. When building
a DeclineShift solution for a particular
asset, Baker Hughes takes an individual
approach, focusing on the asset profile
and the operators objectives and drivers
(Fig. 1). Each solution begins with close
examination of the areas that have the
greatest effect on each operators bottom
line. This examination can range from
individual-well diagnostics to full-field
analyses, and focuses on three primary
Fig. 1Each DeclineShift solution
is developed with a collaborative
approach, leveraging the operators
asset expertise and Baker Hughes
broad technology portfolio and
application knowledge, to deliver
fast, high-impact results.
22
challenges: optimizing production from
existing wells, maximizing revenue from
production, and increasing recoverable
resources. By use of accurate asset profil-
ing and root-cause analysis of decreasing
performance, Baker Hughes designs effi-
cient, integrated solutions to maximize
immediate and long-term value. Because
each solution is engineered in a precise
manner, most require only a small wellsite
footprint and can be designed to address
multiple challenges in a single operation.
For additional information, visit
www.bakerhughes.com.
Scale Inhibitor
U.S. Water introduced ScaleGone and
ScaleGone CI, an innovative, long-
lasting (up to several years), slow-release,
solid scale inhibitor (SI) and a combined
SI/corrosion inhibitor (CI) for hydraulic-
fracturing fluids as well as use in produc-
ing wells. ScaleGone solid SI particles,
which measure the same size as prop-
pant, can be introduced during stimu-
lation treatment, ensuring distribution
throughout the well fracture (Fig. 2). Safe
to use with other stimulation products,
ScaleGone slowly releases into well pro-
duced fluids. In addition, ScaleGone can
be introduced into already-producing
Fig. 2U.S. Water operation in Colorado.
wells. ScaleGone and ScaleGone CI are
slow-release products, providing long-
lasting scale and corrosion protection up
to several years depending on loading.
These products can prevent deposition
in the wellbore region and the tubing
just as powerfully as they can at the for-
mation face, to prevent scale and costly
production problems. U.S. Waters family
of ScaleGone products can provide flow
assurance and asset integrity through-
out the life of a well, with no need for
truck-treating liquid products or tanks
and pumps for continuous feeding of liq-
uid chemicals. ScaleGone helps ensure
maximum well production by preventing
scale deposits that reduce flow and helps
provide extended well integrity with cor-
rosion protection.
For additional information, visit
www.uswaterservices.com.
Production and Reservoir-
Management System
Schlumberger, in collaboration with Saudi
Aramco, has developed a new comple-
tion system that provides simultaneous
control of multiple zones across multiple
well sections, increasing recovery while
reducing lifting and intervention costs
(Fig. 3). The Manara production and res-
JPT DECEMBER 2015


Fig. 3Schlumbergers Manara production and reservoir-management system.
ervoir management system, which uses
inductive coupler technology to provide
power and telemetry, can be deployed in
conventional or extended-reach wells, in
two or more sections, or across any num-
ber of lateral junctions. The system incor-
porates compact stations positioned in
zones within each well section to mea-
sure water cut, fluid-flow rate, pressure,
and temperature in real time. Multiple
stations can be placed in each lateral,
providing precise control of zonal pro-
duction or drawdown. Work flows that
normally take 3 to 6 months can be per-
formed in 1 day. Sensors placed upstream
of stations analyze production from the
associated zone, with data communicat-
ed to the surface through a single elec-
tric control line. When a particular zone
sees water breakthrough, the system can
adjust the electric flow-control valve to
hold back the water while other zones
continue producing. The Manara system
has been installed in four wells in the Mid-
dle East. In one case, six stations and four
inductive couplers were deployed in three
laterals of a well, providing daily down-
hole monitoring, reservoir management,
and drawdown control in each zone.
For additional information, visit
www.schlumberger.com.
Lining System
The Duoline Flush System is an extension
and natural progression to the success-
ful Duoline DL System, which has been
used in thousands of onshore and off-
shore wells worldwide over the past 10
years. Using the same component mate-
rial with an enhanced internal geometry,
Duoline is now able to offer an increased
through bore while still maintaining all
24
tions for proactive well, reservoir, and
the benefits of the original Duoline DL
Ring System (Fig. 4). Duoline Flush is
a glass-reinforced-epoxy lining system
that, when installed into carbon-steel cas-
ing and tubing, protects the base mate-
rial from corrosion from materials that
may be present in the well fluid. Reservoir
cleanup with hydrochloric acid at concen-
trations up to 28% can be accommodated
to ensure good flow rates. Duoline Flush
may be installed into threaded oil-country
tubular goods, either new or used, with-
in most connection options. The Duoline
Flush System uses the patented FL-Ring
system that permits lining of shoulder-to-
shoulder premium connections without
affecting the geometry and performance
of the connections. The system can be
installed into a wide range of bore diam-
eters and weights. Duoline can accommo-
date interventions with both coiled tub-
API
API Pipe Coupling
Liner
Fig. 4The new Duoline Flush System provides increased through bore
while maintaining all the benefits of the original Duoline DL Ring System.
(API=American Petroleum Institute.)
ing and wireline; procedures are already
available for thisoperation.
For additional information, visit
www.duoline.com.
Production-Optimization
Consulting Service
Weatherford introduced its production-
optimization consulting services. The
consultants are in-house subject-matter
experts who collaborate with operators
to design integrated optimization solu-
asset management. Drawing from a com-
prehensive portfolio of lift equipment
and a 480,000-well history of successful
software deployments, consultants assist
with choosing the right technologies
for the optimal outcome. The consult-
ing team can configure offeringswhich
include artificial-lift systems, surface
and downhole sensors, controllers, and
production-optimization software
to suit assets ranging from convention-
al and deepwater sources to unconven-
tional shale and heavy-oil sources. The
team also can recommend comprehen-
sive solutions for various operational
challenges. For example, they can part-
ner with operators to maximize produc-
tion in naturally flowing and artificially
lifted wells with high outputs, or they can
help to reduce operational costs in assets
with thousands of minimally producing
wells. The services follow a cycle of ongo-
Ring
Grout API Pipe
Liner
API Flush Flare
JPT DECEMBER 2015
 Adjust Appraise

Artificial-Lift
Analyze Optimization Select
Cycle

Monitor Design

Fig. 5Weatherford production- Fig. 6Thermoflex PE, a lightweight polyethylene pipe for cold-weather
optimization consulting uses a six- climates from Polyflow.
stage cycle to help operators enhance
performance and achieve full-field
optimization.

ing improvement, which mirrors the

industry-recognized structure to opti-
mize performance and maximize profit-
ability. The cycle includes well appraisal,
lift selection (if needed), system design,
performance monitoring, data analysis,
and operational adjustments (Fig. 5).
For additional information, visit
www.weatherford.com.

Cold-Weather Pipe
Polyflow, a manufacturer of spoolable
reinforced thermoplastic pipe for trans-
porting hydrocarbons, water, and other
fluids, announced the launch of Thermo-
flex PE, a lightweight polyethylene pipe
for cold-weather climates. Production of
Thermoflex PE is currently under way,
and it will be available in various sizes
and pressure ratings (Fig. 6). The market
need for pipe that can withstand tough
climates calls for a better choice than
steel or other plastic pipe in the Bakken.
Thermoflexs unique polymer construc-
tion and aramid-fiber reinforcement
deliver high resistance to hydrocarbons
in sour and sweet environments around
the world. Operators in cold environ-
ments can benefit from Thermoflex
PEs resistance to corrosion and cycli-
cal loading. This allows oil and gas
exploration-and-production companies
in the Bakken and other northern regions
to get wells flowing faster for increased
profitability while enhancing safety,
reliability, and longevity. In support of
Thermoflex PE, Polyflow delivers ser-
vice in the field as well, from modeling,
Fig. 7A map-view slice from one well of, from left, a stimulated rock
volume (SRV), an APV approximately 2 years into production, and an APV
approximately 3 years into production from Global Geophysical Services.
installation, and support to its ExPERT contributing to production. Fluid noise in
pipeline-rehabilitation program. the fracture system is also imaged. When
For additional information, visit a well is producing, the drainage network
www.polyflowglobal.com. that is connected to the wellbore experi-
ences enhanced activity because of the
Production-Monitoring System movement of fluid; the resultant changes
Ambient seismic activity generated by in local stress cause failure events. Glob-
producing wells can be used to map the al Geophysical Services Ambient Seis-
volume of rock surrounding the well- mic production monitoring is useful for
bore. This acoustically active rock vol- observing changes in APVs over time. This
ume is termed the active production 4D monitoring, when conducted at regu-
volume (APV). While monitoring micro- lar intervals over years of production, pro-
seismic activity during hydraulic fractur- vides unprecedented views of reservoir
ing has become a common practice, using production (Fig. 7). These APVs can be
the lower-amplitude ambient signal to used for making predrill predictions about
monitor production is a new and prom- production volumes, for understanding
ising technology. Small changes in local the interactions between producing wells,
stresses can result in failure on small pre- and for determining refracturing candi-
existing fractures. This generates acoustic dates and infill-drilling strategies. JPT
activity that, when imaged, reveals reser- For additional information, visit
voir features including the volume of rock www.globalgeophysical.com/ambient.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 25

 TECHNOLOGY UPDATE

Magnetic Resonance-While-Drilling System

Improves Understanding of Complex Reservoirs
Kirill Kuptsov, Roger Griffiths, SPE, and David Maggs, SPE, Schlumberger

Reservoirs consisting of heterogeneous
carbonates and shaly sands pose for-
mation evaluation challenges for con-
ventional logging-while-drilling (LWD)
measurements. Widely used resistivi-
ty, density, neutron porosity, and sonic
measurements are all sensitive to both
the formation matrix and the fluids,
which may create ambiguities in the
evaluation of reservoir fluids.
The Schlumberger proVision Plus
magnetic resonance-while-drilling
(MRWD) technology offers enhanced
evaluation capabilities. By manipulating
the hydrogen atoms in the fluids, nucle-
ar magnetic resonance (NMR) meth-
ods provide a focused measurement of
fluid properties and their interactions
Mineralogy-Independent Porosity
T2=
Signal distribution
Signal distribution
with the surrounding matrix at a funda-
mental level. The technology provides a
more complete, real-time assessment of
producibility in complex reservoirs.
Evolution of the Technology
The industry has used NMR technol-
ogy for formation evaluation for more
than 25 years, during which significant
technical and operational developments
have greatly enhanced its capabilities
and applications. In porous media, NMR
techniques reveal pore and fluid prop-
erties by exciting the nuclear states of
hydrogen-containing molecules in the
formation fluids and measuring the
relaxation times for the induced excited
energy states.
Facies Analysis Pore Size Distribution
ing environments.
The relaxation time for a molecule
near a pore wall surface tends to be much
faster than that for a molecule in the bulk
fluid volume. A distribution of all the
relaxation times, known as a T2 distribu-
tion, can be used to derive both irreduc-
ible and producible fluid volumes, and
an improved estimation of permeability.
These measurements are also important
for identifying bypassed pay zones and
estimating productionrates.
The first NMR tools were deployed
on wireline after the hole had been
drilled, which added rig time and cost
to the operation and did not allow for
real-time changes to the wellbores tra-
jectory. Schlumberger shifted the ser-
vice from wireline to a while-drill-
ing application in 2002. This early
work focused on redesigning the sen-
sor array to make it more robust and
capable of withstanding dynamic drill-

The design effort culminated with

the introduction of the companys lat-
est MRWD system in 2012. Its new sen-
sor makes reliable measurements under
rapidly changing downhole tempera-
tures and pressures and withstands the
T2, msec T2, msec vibrations and drillstring shocks that are
common during drilling.
Irreducible Water and Free Fluid Continuous Permeability Further design enhancements allow
the tool to be placed anywhere with-
k(NMR)=(NMR,T2LM)
Signal distribution

Signal distribution

in the bottomhole assembly (BHA). A

sleeve stabilizer minimizes tool motion
without affecting the steerability of the
BHA. Powered by a downhole electri-
cal turbine, the tool does not need to be
tripped to replace batteries.
T2, msec T2, msec
A Complete Petrophysical
Fig. 1The magnetic resonance-while-drilling technology acquires a T2
Picture
distribution to provide lithology-independent petrophysical measurements. By yielding lithology-independent
Graphics courtesy of Schlumberger. porosity, pore-size distribution, and

26 JPT DECEMBER 2015

 The 2015 generation Anti Stick-Slip Tool (AST) uses a new
counterforce solution for balancing the load on the PDC cutters
in both axial and angular directions. This makes it possible to land
any PDC drill-bit on hard rock without risk of impact damage.

HARD ROCK NEWS

The better protection of the PDC cutters in the first contact 3D & LAYOUT: RENDER.NO
COUNTERFORCE
with the bottom of the hole has already delivered impressive
results. An operator in South-Eastern Europe recently drilled
a deep 6.0 inch section in one bit-run with excellent ROP.
The bit drilled for 235 hours to a local TVD record of 5350m
(17500). Back on surface, the bit was graded 1-3-WT.

A similar result was obtained by a major operator drilling on

the UK shelf where the planned turbine and impregnated bit
was replaced by a conventional PDC bit and the AST solution. The 2015 counterforce upgrade enables the AST
to prevent the onset of damaging vibrations as the
cutters first engage the rock.
Contact us:
Aberdeen: +44 1224 561313
Houston: +1 713 557-7542
Stavanger: +47 51 95 11 70
Rio de Janeiro: +21 3497-5083

www.tomax.no
 Attenuation Resistivity
at 40-in Spacing

Dry-weight fraction of quartz, feldspar, and mica

0.2 ohm.m 2,000
Attenuation Resistivity
at 28-in Spacing

Volume fraction of quartz, feldspar, mica

0.2 ohm.m 2,000

Dry-weight fraction of carbon

Dry-weight fraction of pyrite

Attenuation Resistivity Bound Fluid

Dry-weight fraction of clay

Volume fraction of carbonates

at 16-in Spacing
Free Fluid

Volume fraction of pyrite

0.2 ohm.m 2,000

Volume fraction of clay

Phase Shift Resistivity, Magnetic Resonance Magnetic Resonance

Irreducible water
Rate of Penetration 40-in Spacing Porosity Porosity
< 3 ms Cumulative Porosity Net

Bound water
0 0.2 ohm.m 2,000 0.6 ft3/ft3

Oil volume
100 m/h ft3/ft3 0 0.6 0

Free water
T2 Distribution Formation
310 ms Pressure-While- Cumulative Porosity Gross
Phase Shift Resistivity Thin-Bed
Bound Fluid Drilling Permeability Analysis
Formation Sigma at 28-in Spacing Density 1030 ms
Density Image Spectroscopy T2 Logarithmic Mean Volume Cumulative Porosity Gross
0.1 mD 10,000 0.5 3.5
0 cu 40 0.2 ohm.m 2,000 1.65 g/cm3 2.65 30100 ms
1.96 2.33 0.50 4.50 0.5 ms 5,000 0.6 ft3/ft3 0 0 m 15
Phase Shift Resistivity, Magnetic Resonance Thin-Bed 0.50 8.50
Caliper Gamma Ray 16-in Spacing Neutron Porosity Density Image Spectroscopy T2 Cutoff Density Porosity 100300 ms Cumulative Porosity Net
Permeability Analysis Volumetrics
105 in 510 0 gAPI 150 0.2 ohm.m 2,000 0.6 ft3/ft3 0 0.68 g/cm3 3.9 0 1 0.5 ms 5,000 0.3 g/cm3 0 > 300 ms 0.1 mD 10,000 0 unitless 1 0 ft3/ft3 1 0 m 15

Thinly
laminated
sand-shale
pay zone

Thinly
laminated
sand-shale
pay zone

Fig. 2In a deepwater well offshore West Africa, the Schlumberger multifunction logging-while-drilling system
clearly identified two distinct pay sands. When these logs were combined with the magnetic resonance-while-drilling
measurements, two additional laminated sand-shale sequences were discovered. The result was a 60% increase in
calculated reserves.

continuous permeability measure- sourceless formation evaluation-while- meability in both shaly sands and
ments, and providing direct detection of drilling technology, which uses pulsed heterogeneouscarbonates.
hydrocarbons, the technology offers a neutron generator technology to yield a The MRWD system also identifies
number of benefits in the assessment of detailed description of the rock matrix areas of low permeability, thus helping
complex reservoirs (Fig.1). Because the mineralogy. Taken together, the two to improve decision making about where
data are acquired as the well is drilled, technologies provide sophisticated rock and how to produce. When additional pay
petrophysicists and reservoir engineers and fluid property evaluation without zones are discovered, the data can be used
can assess the formation fluids before chemical sources. to create a targeted completiondesign.
they commingle with drilling fluid, The combined use of the two tech-
which complicates evaluation. nologies yields a complete petrophys- Case Studies
The MRWD data complement other ical picture of reservoir quality, mak- An operator drilling a deepwater well
LWD data, enabling advanced petrophys- ing it possible to identify pay zones that offshore West Africa required a better
ical evaluation of complex reservoirs. For would otherwise be passed over and means of evaluating potential pay zones
example, the system can be run with a accurately determine reservoir per- in a thinly bedded sandstone reservoir.

28 JPT DECEMBER 2015

 The MRWD technology enabled the measurement of lithol-
ogy-independent porosity and provided the ability to distin-
guish between irreducible and free fluids, both of which were
critical in identifying bypassed pay, evaluating reserves, and
determining producibility.
The T2 distribution relaxation times enabled the operator to
characterize two laminated sand-shale sequences in real time,
resulting in a 60% increase in calculated reserves. The analy-
sis also allowed for estimates of net-to-gross and continuous
permeability, which guided the selection of perforation inter-
vals and helped optimize the completion design (Fig. 2).
The technology also provides more detailed characteriza-
tion of carbonates than is possible with the use of triple-combo
logging alone.
An operator in South America identified a heterogeneous
formation comprising limestone, dolomite, sand, silt, and
clay, which was drilled with a 12-in. bit. The operator ran
a triple-combo logging suite to evaluate the formation, but
because carbonates were mixed with shales, there was insuffi-
cient information for accurate porosity evaluation.
The MRWD system was proposed as a means of more accu-
rately characterizing the carbonate sequences, thus increas-
ing the likelihood that all feasible pay zones could be exploit-
ed. The operator ran the technology with a coring system that
allowed the LWD data to be compared with laboratory core
measurements. Petrotechnical experts provided real-time
support to facilitate informed changes to the drilling opera-
tion while the tools were still in the hole.
Using the MRWD technology, the operator was able to
log the interval in drilling mode, with no interference to the
coring operation. The system acquired data that accurately
reflected the rock properties as confirmed by core analysis,
despite the large hole size and wellboredeterioration.
The data enabled additional operator insight into the reser-
voir, leading to the identification of a previously undiscovered
sand body that was unexpected in the geological sequence.
The additional pay sand was of higher quality than the origi-
nal target sand body and added significantly to the productiv-
ity of the field.

Continued Innovation
The latest generation of the MRWD system has been used in
more than 250 wells worldwide, with more than 250,000 m
of formation logged. Further advancements have been made
to the system, including a larger tool size. To complement
the 6-in. tool for 8-in. holes, the MRWD 8-in. tool was
introduced this year for 12-in. holes.
New processing techniques are also being developed to
extract greater value from the measurements provided by the
technology. The techniques will help reveal the porosity and
fluid signatures in the data. Ultimately, this information will
extend the systems ability to reveal previously hidden pay
zones and optimize completion strategies to maximize the
producibility of complex plays. JPT

JPT DECEMBER 2015

 E&P NOTES
Study Finds Surface Spills a Higher Risk
to Groundwater Than Fracturing
Trent Jacobs, JPT Senior Technology Writer
Researchers at Yale University who ana-
lyzed groundwater wells in the Marcellus
Shale area have determined that hydrau-
lic fracturing is highly unlikely to be a
direct source of contamination.
The 3-year study, published in the Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Sci-
ences, also found that well casing failures
and produced water containment ponds
did not impact the groundwater samples
taken during the study. The research-
ers concluded that the samples that test-
ed positive for some of the same organ-
ic chemical compounds used in drilling
and completion operations, but not in
dangerous concentrations, resulted from
accidental spills on the surface.
We found that there was a significant
relationship between the levels of diesel-
range organic compounds and the loca-
Residential wellsites from one of the most active areas of the Marcellus Shale
in northeastern Pennsylvania were tested to determine likely sources of
groundwater contamination. Image courtesy of Yale University.
30
tion to a shale gas well in the study area,
said Brian Drollette, the studys lead
researcher and a PhD student at Yale.
Furthermore, we saw that this relation-
ship also existed between the concen-
tration and the distance to the nearest
gas well that had an environmental and
health safety violation.
From 2012 through 2014, Drollette
took samples from 64 residential water
wells spread across about 7400 km2 in
northeastern Pennsylvania, making it
the most extensive study of its kind to
date. Unlike earlier studies that have
focused exclusively on methane migra-
tion into groundwater, the Yale-led effort
also analyzed water samples for a sub-
set of heavier chemicals that represent
about 10% of those disclosed through
public databases such as FracFocus.
The samples with the highest con-
centration of organic compounds were
taken from water wells less than 300 ft
deep. Additionally, two of the positive
samples contained a known hydraulic
fracturing additive, which Drollette said
supports the likelihood that chemicals
released onto the surface will potentially
leach into groundwater sources.
For the organic compounds addressed
by US federal safe drinking water stan-
dards, the study found that the concen-
trations were well below those the laws
allow and could be easily removed with
inexpensive and widely available carbon
filters. For those chemicals where no
standards exist, specifically the diesel-
range organic compounds, the research-
ers said their concentrations were also
very low.
The researchers analyzed the sam-
ples using techniques such as noble
gas analysis and inorganic fingerprint-
ing that allowed them to dismiss other
potential sources of contamination.
Analysis of the samples with the
highest concentration of organic
compounds showed that the aquifer
water was geologically young
compared with the saline water
associated with the Marcellus Shale,
which indicated that the upward
migration through thousands of feet
of rock was unlikely.
Had the heavy organic compounds
been transported into the
groundwater via a leaking well
casing,they likely would have
been accompanied by high levels
of lighter gases such as methane,
which were not observed.
If there were breaches in
containment ponds, levels of
inorganic compounds such as
JPT DECEMBER 2015
 bromide and chloride would have
been elevated.
Diffusion through the polymer
liners used in containment ponds
was found to be highly unlikely after
computer modeling showed that the
process would have taken decades.
While many of the studys key find-
ings are in line with the shale indus-
trys claims that hydraulic fracturing
poses minimal risk to groundwater, the
researchers cautioned against extrap-
olating the findings beyond the
sampleregion.
Desiree Plata, an assistant professor of
chemical and environmental engineer-
Statistics Point to Water Injection as Cause of Earthquakes,
But Understanding Why Remains a Geological Puzzle
Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor
A surge in earthquakes tightly clustered
in southern Kansas that followed the large
increase in produced water injections
prompted the state to cut the daily limits
Number of Earthquakes
on disposal wells in that area to see if that
will help solve the problem.
Based on 3 months of reduced injec-
tions through mid-September, the results
were encouraging, said Shelby Peterie, a
research geophysicist at the Kansas Geo-
logical Survey. Her presentation at the
Society of Exploration Geophysicists
annual meeting in New Orleans in Octo-
ber showed there has been a reduction in
the intensity of the earthquakes reported,
but not the number of them.
The limits imposed by Kansas regula-
tors were extended another 6 months
in September to see if the earthquakes,
which climbed only after a couple years
of increased water disposal beginning
around 2011, will go down gradually
overtime.
The rate of earthquakes per year in
Kansas of magnitude 3 or more, which
is the level at which they are easily
observed, has jumped to about 50 per
year in 2014 and 2015, up from less than
one every 2 years, she said.
This represented a jarring change in
the status quo in a state in the center of
the country located far from the earth-
quake-prone parts of the country.
JPT DECEMBER 2015
ing at Yale and a coauthor of the study, Nevertheless, Plata said the study
explained that while the unrestricted should be a signal to the shale industry
flow from the Marcellus Shale layer to that it needs to pay closer attention to its
aquifer layers is not supported by this aboveground activities and strengthen
studys findings, there may be regions controls regarding spills to address con-
where unique geology would allow for cerns over groundwater contamination.
such a phenomenon. What happens at the surface is real-
I think thats encouraging from an ly important and actually much more
industry perspective because it means controllable, so you should take advan-
you do have some separation between tage of the opportunities to try and pre-
those horizons, she said. But the truth vent those releases, she said. When
is that if youre essentially engineering they do happen, respond to them real-
the subsurface, you could create a prefer- ly quickly or inform the people living in
ential flow path that results in enhanced the area so that they can take control of
communication with deep shale horizons their own water sources and treat for
or fluids and the shallow groundwater. thesematerials.
30
Magnitude
2 3 4
25
20
15
10
5
0
Jan-13
Feb-13
Mar-13
Apr-13
May-13
Jun-13
Jul-13
Aug-13
Sep-13
Oct-13
Nov-13
Dec-13
Jan-14
Feb-14
Mar-14
Apr-14
May-14
Jun-14
Jul-14
Aug-14
Sep-14
Oct-14
Nov-14
Dec-14
Jan-15
Feb-15
Mar-15
Apr-15
May-15
Jun-15
Jul-15
Aug-15
Sep-15
Oct-15
Month
A dramatic rise is shown in the number of seismic events that peaked
betweenlate last year and early this year in Kansas. Graphic courtesy of the
Kansas Geologic Survey.
As for the cause of the large increase in existing fault system and, under certain
incidence, Peterie said, It is likely that circumstances, allow a fault to move,
not all of these are naturally caused. said Rex Buchanan, interim director of
The cautious comment reflects a politi- the Kansas Geological Survey, in a testi-
cally charged issue, where the statistical mony on 26 January.
link appears clear. The rise in seismic An advisory from the survey in August
activity has been concentrated in a small about the potential for triggered earth-
area in south-central Kansas where quakes added, Linking a specific earth-
there was also a sharp increase in salt- quake to a specific human activity, such
water disposal. as wastewater disposal in a single well,
The added volume of injections deep is difficult.
into the subsurface may lower the fric- The rise in earthquakes has been con-
tional resistance between rocks along an centrated in two counties that histori-
31
 cally were not prone to earthquakes. Five
areas within those counties were mapped
based on the rise in earthquake activity.
Within that cluster, increased oil and gas
exploration and production activity had
pushed injection per disposal well from
an average of 8,000B/D to 20,000 B/D
40,000 B/D, and even higher. There was
a 700% increase in saltwater disposal
and a corresponding rise in the earth-
quake rate, Peteriesaid.
In June, the injection rates within the
cluster were reduced to the levels before
the rise in unconventional exploration, to
an average maximum of about 8,000 B/D.
The program limits injections into the
deep Arbuckle aquifer. In addition, the
drastic drop in oilfield activity due to con-
tinued low oil and gas prices is also likely
to be reducing the amount of waterpro-
duced and requiring injection disposal.
Oil industry groups have questioned
whether there is geological evidence
From Air to Sea: Introducing Crew Resource Management
to the Offshore Industry
Trent Jacobs, JPT Senior Technology Writer
Despite a number of recent and high-
profile jetliner crashes, commercial avi-
ation has entered into a new era of safe-
ty. Seven of the past 10 years have seen
the fewest fatal accidents in the indus-
trys nearly 7-decade history and this
year is on track to be the safest yet.
Aside from the significant improve-
ments made in aircraft reliability, much
of the progress has been attributed to the
Key personnel working through problems in a rig simulator. Coupling
simulators with enhanced communication training, some believe rig operations
can be made safer and more efficient. Photo courtesy of The Well Academy.
32
linking the phenomenon, and based on
papers at the conference, the fact that
increased water and earthquakes appear
linked in some areas and not in others is
not well understood.
An article in Science (19 June 2015) by F.
Rall Walsh III and Mark Zoback reported
that in Oklahoma, induced seismic activ-
ity may be the product of multiple dispos-
al wells injecting fluids that affect a broad
area. Peterie mentioned the study about
conditions in Oklahoma and oil and gas
operations extending north to the part of
Kansas seeing a rise in earthquakes.
Seismic activity began after sever-
al years of increased injections related
to unconventional oil and gas explora-
tion and production in those two coun-
ties. She cautioned that these are early
results, and it is too soon to judge the
programseffectiveness.
Another presentation at the ses-
sion addressed the difficult challenge
communication and operational training
program known as crew resource man-
agement (CRM).
The basic principle of CRM is to encour-
age key personnel to speak up when they
detect problems or notice mistakes while
maintaining the hierarchy of authority.
The concept was born from the ashes
of the aviation industrys deadliest acci-
dent at the Spanish island of Tenerife in
of predicting when injection may cause
increased activity, and when it will not.
The vast majority of the wells are
injecting a lot of fluid and not seeing
more earthquakes or any at all, said
James Verdon, a postdoctoral fellow at
the University of Bristol.
The study considered a statistical
analysis approach and also a geologi-
cal approach, and the results from both
appeared to work when history-matched
in the fields studied.
But petroleum engineers insisting on
proof in the ground need to consider the
effort it took to categorize the geologi-
cal features in the Salah field in Libya,
the results of which were used to predict
induced seismic activity.
This was a huge amount of work, he
said. The analysis included modeling the
stress and pressure within 300,000 frac-
tures in the Salah field. This may not be
commercially feasible for everyproject.
1977 where 583 people were killed when
two Boeing 747s collided on the runway.
A dense fog that enveloped the airport
the day of the crash certainly played a
role. However, what ultimately led to the
disaster was the poor communication
between pilots and air traffic controllers
and the bad decision making thatensued.
In the search for answers on how
to avoid such preventable tragedies in
the future, the experts determined that
improving communications in the cock-
pit was critical. In 1979, CRM was devel-
oped and by the 1990s, it became a hall-
mark of airline training programs around
the world. Today, CRM is credited with
saving the lives of countless passengers
and airline crews.
The hope is that someday the same can
be said for the offshore drilling sector.
Five years removed from the Macondo
subsea blowout that killed 11 crewmen
and led to the worst oil spill in US histo-
ry, the offshore sector has made signifi-
cant strides in work safety. Yet it remains
to be seen whether that event will lead to
JPT DECEMBER 2015
 2,407 pieces, one goal:
Uptime, all the time.
Thats why we have invested in a dedicated R&D laboratory that is second to none.
Designed to simulate the harshest subsea environments, we hold ourselves to a
higher standard and take pride knowing that our equipment is subjected to extreme
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2407 Pieces NXT BOP Ad.indd 1 10/6/2015 12:54:01 PM

 the widespread adoption of CRM in the
offshore sector.
One of the safety experts pioneering
the effort to see that it does is George Gal-
loway, the director and cofounder of The
Well Academy in Apeldoorn, The Neth-
erlands. The training facility is one of
four in the world participating in a CRM
pilot program organized by the Inter-
national Well Control Forum (IWCF), a
leading certification body for the oil and
gas industry. In October, Lloyds Register
Energys Training Academy announced it
was partnering with The Well Academy
to develop new courses using CRM, the
first of which is expected to be offered
this month.
Galloway has nearly 30 years of experi-
ence working in the North Sea as a petro-
leum engineer involved in various off-
shore operations. He came to understand
the value of CRM through a safety-focused
work group that in 2011 brought togeth-
er industry groups and regulators from
the UK, Norway, and The Netherlands to
improve the training of drillingcrews.
The early program that we devel-
oped was still very much technically
based, he said. We were putting people
through various well control situations
and assessing them more on their techni-
cal competence. But what we realized was
missing were the human factors.
The following year, Galloway and
other oil and gas industry professionals
founded The Well Academy, which would
implement many of the lessons learned
from the work group. To address the
human factor issue, they brought in an
aviation psychologist who incorporated
CRM into the schools rig floor simulator
training exercises.
It completely changed the whole
dynamics of the course and the pro-
gram, said Galloway. He explained that
the focus shifted from assessing the tech-
nical abilities of crews to assessing their
behavior when dealing with a well con-
trol event.
Assistant drillers, drillers, tool push-
ers, offshore installation managers, and
operator representativesall the people
on a rig responsible for a wells construc-
tiontake part in the simulations. Each
scenario begins just like a typical crew
change in the real world. The trainees
34
Accident Rate
1970 1980
The implementation of crew resource management (CRM) has helped make
commercial aviation the safest mode of transportation. This achievement has
led to the expansion of CRM to an increasing number of industries in which
good teamwork can save lives. Image courtesy of Indelta Learning Systems.
are given an update on what the previ-
ous shift completed and a well schematic
before going to work.
And then we will continue to play an
event, Galloway said. They may be in
the process of circulating with a heavy
fluid and we will suddenly introduce
water into the circulation, which light-
ens the fluid and could potentially lead to
an influx of hydrocarbons into the well.
Once a wrench is thrown into the
works, the CRM assessors observe how
the team recognizes the problem, and
more importantly, how it responds. Spe-
cifically, they are grading the crews on
their situational awareness, decision
making, leadership, teamwork, and com-
munication skills.
Galloway said when teams go through
the first simulation, their communica-
tion deficiencies typically exacerbate the
problems they face. Those in the lead-
ership roles begin issuing orders and
attempt to take control of the situation.
Without CRM training, Galloway said,
We will often find that he will take them
down the wrong path and they will cre-
ate a blowout because they have not dealt
with the situation quick enough.
He added that following the simulator
exercise, many of the junior crew mem-
bers admit that while they felt mistakes
were being made, they did not have the
confidence to counter the orders of those
in charge. As CRM is implemented, these
communication barriers are eroded.
As it enters its third year of CRM and
simulator-based training, The Well Acad-
emy recently launched a refresher course
Aircraft Departures
1990 2000
for companies that want to send their drill-
ing crews back through the program. The
refresher program focuses largely on job
preparation and the use of checklists. Gal-
loway said he would like to see the type of
program his school offers become an indus-
try standard; as it stands today, there are no
requirements for offshore drilling crews to
receive training in CRM orsimulators.
Many companies only send individ-
ual drilling crew members to train-
ing facilities to complete the mandato-
ry classroom coursework and written
exams, which were recently overhauled
in response to the lessons learned from
Macondo. With the industry now facing
a prolonged downturn in oil and gas pric-
es, Galloway expressed concern that the
offshore sector will train drilling crews
only to meet the minimumrequirements.
A big challenge we face right now is
the current climate we are in, he said.
Everyone is reducing costs, and we find
that in a cost-cutting environment, train-
ing is often one of the first things that
tends to go.
Even before the oil price crash, Gallo-
way said the industrys investment in pro-
active measures such as CRM and train-
ing simulators was lagging far behind
the billions spent on capping stacks and
other spill response systems.
If you look at what has happened
post-Macondo, and where a lot of the
focus and attention has been given, it has
really been given to containing a situa-
tion should it happen againrather than
focusing resources and money on the
prevention, he said.
JPT DECEMBER 2015
Air Gun Inventor Creates A Lower Pressure Option
Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor
More than 50 years after inventing the
air gun, Stephen Chelminski is working
on a new version of the industry stan-
dard designed to be more in tune with
the current needs of the industry and
itsregulators.
While the components used would be
familiar to anyone who has worked with
an air gun, it has a fatter shape and pro-
duces sounds in a lower range. If it were
a horn, it would be a tuba and a standard
air gun would be a trumpet.
The goal is to reduce the energy emitted
to produce the lower frequency range that
is useful for seismic, while decreasing the
emission of frequencies said to cause trou-
ble for marine life. Something like 3% to
6% of the energy from an air gun is turned
into useful energy for seismic. The rest is
wasted, said Chelminski, chief executive
officer of Chelminski Research, during an
interview at the recent Society of Explora-
tion Geophysicists (SEG) annual meeting
in New Orleans.
Stephen Chelminski, the inventor of
the air gun, is now testing a new-
generation device designed to deliver
better seismic surveys with reduced
environmental impact.
JPT DECEMBER 2015
The working name for the device is
the Low Pressure Source (LPS), which
he refers to as a sound source. That
distinction reflects the negative asso-
ciations that have been attached to the
name airgun.
In redesigning the original, the goal
was to create a familiar device that emits
a lower energy burst of sound concen-
trated on less than 100 Hz, with more
of the hard-to-get signals below 10 Hz.
The low frequencies are critical,
said Shuki Ronen, external and col-
laborative research manager for Dol-
phin Geophysical, which is supporting
Chelminskis work to commercialize the
LPS. He said the device can generate a
signal that is a quarter octave lower than
a standard air gun, which is valued for
what it can reveal about rock properties
and deeper layers.
The seismic services company
planned to decide late this year whether
to pay to build a full-sized version of the
new sound source for testing, which will
depend on whether there are interested
users, Ronen said.
It is competing for attention at a
time when there has been an upsurge
in new sound source development,
ranging from new-generation guns
to marine vibrators. All are aiming at
better frequency control and lower
energysignals.
Frequencies higher than 100 Hz are
an environmental issueresearchers
say they are a threat to marine mammals
and certain fishwhich has led to the
need for compliance with regulations
that may cause costly delays in survey
work. The higher-frequency sounds are
of little use for seismic imaging because
they dissipate in the earth, contributing
little to images based on the signals that
echo up to the surface.
Chelminski described how the air gun
works: A large volume of air emitted at
a moderate pressure bursts through a
large port to create a bubble, which pro-
duces the sound waves needed for seis-
mic surveys.
By reducing the air pressure by more
than 50% and significantly increasing
the volume of air used to create the
sound, the device increases the dura-
tion of the sound emitted, changing it
to a lower frequency boom. The output
also is said to offer a larger volume of
the low-frequency signals needed for
determining rock properties and imag-
ing deepertargets.
Those figures were based on testing of
a reduced-size prototype of the device in
Seneca Lake, New York, which is home
to a testing facility used by the US Navy
for testing sonar equipment.
If Chelminskis air gun reaches the
market, it will be up against a newly
designed air gun with a limited high-
frequency bandwidth from Teledyne
Bolt, whose website traces its air gun
business back to Chelminskis original
design in the mid-1960s.
The Teledyne Bolt air gun is called
the E-source air gun and was developed
in conjunction with Schlumberger. It is
ready for use in a full seismic survey,
said David Gerez, technology manager
of sound sources at Schlumberger, in an
SEG conference presentation.
Looking ahead, there are multiple
companies, including Teledyne, work-
ing on a new generation of marine
vibrators, which open the possibili-
ty of sound sources with even more
frequency control and longer, lower-
energy signals that are more of a hum
than a pop.
Ronens SEG presentation showed
that a new generation of lower pressure
devices based on an air gun design may
not equal what the marine vibrators are
promising in terms of reduced sound
energy and frequency control. But air
guns have a significant edge because
they are familiar devices that the off-
shore industry has embraced due to
their reliability and low cost.
The LPS from Chelminski has the same
elements as older air guns, he said, adding
he was trying to design something that
does not present challenges to users.
35
 Drilling Competition Offers Real-World Skills Challenge
Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor
Vimlesh Bavadiya is leading a team of
engineering students at the Universi-
ty of Oklahoma (OU) to repeat its vic-
tory in SPEs Drillbotics competition
nextyear.
The competition to build the best
automated drilling machine was creat-
ed to provide engineering students with
a dose of real-world experience, where
teamwork is required to attack a com-
plex challenge when time and money
are limited, the rules change, and in the
end, things break.
It was a very difficult path. But it
was very good, Bavadiya said, sum-
ming up the experience of the five-mem-
ber team that won the first ever Drill-
botics competition, which was created
by the SPE Drilling Systems Automation
TechnicalSection.
The OU team goes into this school
year with a working drilling rig, as do
the teams from the University of Texas
and Texas A&M University, which also
competed over the last school year. The
goal is to create a device able make the
adjustments needed to drill through a
block made from multiple layers of rock
with no human intervention.
Last year, the challenge was to pro-
gram the driller to change settings
to adjust to the change of hardness
when moving from sandstone to gran-
ite. This academic year, the teams
must drill straight through layers run-
ning at different angles, which will
tend to push the drill bit off course,
said Fred Florence, president of Rig
Operations, who is the cochair of
the competition.
Test rocks will be covered with
cement so competitors cannot see lay-
ers that are described only as not copla-
nar. We want to surprise them, but
not shock them, Florence said. When
we drill a well in the real world, we
have some idea of what rocks we should
encounter. There is uncertainty about
the depths and thicknesses. So we will
36
tell them the rocks physical proper-
ties, such as its average compressive
strength. We will let them know what
formations we expect to deliver, but it
could changeslightly. that were fabricating parts.
Hard times in the business are add-
ing another taste of reality: Teams will
need to raise the money to build their
equipment with budgets again capped
at USD 10,000. And the maximum
weight on bit has been reduced from
50 lb to 20lb, making it harder to drill
efficiently.
The slight winning edge in last years
competitionwhere Florence said it
was almost impossible to differentiate
the winnercame down to how the
OU team responded to a late change in
the required drillpipe to a thin-walled
aluminum tube.
All the teams made adjustments to
deal with that weak link. Bavadiya said
the judges told his team that it gained an
edge by taking the extra step of modify-
ing the hydraulic system to pressurize
the inside of the pipe to resist buckling.
A key team member behind that step
was Mohammad Aljubran, who was in
charge of the hydraulics system, which
had to be revamped up to add the right
amount of pressure, Bavadiya said.
The change required action by others
on the team to adjust the equipment and
control program to the properties of a
pressurized pipe. Team members shared
their knowledge of drilling, mathemat-
ics, electronics, process control, struc-
tural engineering, machining, and weld-
ing, said Ramadan Ahmed, the team
mentor, associate professor of petro-
leum engineering at OU.
Bavadiya said he drew on his years of
drilling experience and the people skills
he gained while leading clubs and other
organizations to create the team effort
that brought out good ideas and kept the
project on track.
Team member Stephen Christy
designed the traveling block that moved
the drilling string in and out of the
hole and played a critical role during
construction, sharing his knowledge of
machine tools with the team members
John Kibe said he used his experi-
ence as an electronics technician to find
more accurate and cheaper substitutes
for the electronic components that cost
far more than the team couldafford.
The derrick structure was designed
by Henry Le, who devised a model-
ing technique to visualize how the rig
components would work together.
Mathematical formulas came from all
the team members, with Christy and
Kibe converting them into the control
systemprogram.
It was a marathon effort. We had dif-
ferent classes, day jobs, and families
with kids to take care of, Bavadiya said.
We would get in the lab to start around
8 pm and work to midnight. Sometimes,
we could go to 2 a.m. or 4 a.m.
Having a working rig is a good start-
ing point, but controlling drilling in a
different type of rock will require sig-
nificant adjustments to keep up with
the competition, which could grow
to six teams or more, Florence said.
While last years teams will be modify-
ing rather than building a rig, he did
not think that will provide a signifi-
cant edge.
Unlike our overly competitive indus-
try, academia readily shares knowledge
without undue emphasis on intellectual
property ownership. The new entrants,
and even the previous ones, for that
matter, can review the other concepts
and choose how they wish to proceed,
he said.
Either way, it is a tough test, and Flor-
ence said those who compete demon-
strate valuable skills. He said that even
in this down market, employers should
hire the graduating competitors because
they know more about this today than
you know. JPT
JPT DECEMBER 2015
 LIFT PANEL

Improving Shale Production

Through Flowback Analysis
Trent Jacobs, JPT Senior Technology Writer

A row of frac tanks used to hold water before and after a hydraulic fracturing
operation stand ready at a wellsite. An increasing number of researchers and
companies believe the flowback stage holds many of the keys needed to unlock
more potential from shale wells. Photo courtesy of Joshua Doubek.

O
nce a horizontal well is hydrau-
lically fractured, the next step
is to clean up the well by flow-
ing it back to remove water and loosen
proppant from the wellbore.
Most shale producers in North Amer-
ica have given little thought to this flow-
back stage and see it merely as a prelude
to the cash-flow generating production
stage. However, a few companies have
come to realize it represents a valuable
opportunity to learn more about their
wells in a week or two than their compet-
itors are learning after several months
ofproduction.
Essentially, flowback data is a bridge
between what happened during a com-
pletion and what will happen as hydro-
carbons are produced. An important
driver shared by all the interested pro-
ducers is that for the most part, they are
already required to record the flowback
stage per US and Canadianregulations.
So arguably, the cost of collecting this
data is nil, said James Crafton, presi-
dent of consultancy firm Performance
Sciences, who has been working with ser-
vice companies and shale producers on
different flowback issues for more than
15years.
Crafton and others involved in this
area have long been trying to convince
the shale business that how a well is
flowed back is often as important as the
completion itself and that by ignoring
this maxim, they are leaving money on
the table. It is that simple, he said.
The frustration for me is that the data is
there. We have the data, but nobody has
the time or perceives the value to inter-
pret the data.
But there are a few outliers crunch-
ing the numbers. Companies including
Devon Energy are using the early produc-
tion and flowing pressure data of flow-
back fluids to establish their production
benchmarks. Nexen Energy is among
those also using flowback data to quick-
ly screen the effective size of fracture
designs, determine key reservoir prop-
erties, and to predict long-term produc-
tion. Ongoing flowback research is look-
ing at the chemical makeup of flowback
fluids to see what else can be learned
about shale reservoir behavior.
At the Black Hawk field in Texas, Devon
reports that flowback analysis has led to

JPT DECEMBER 2015 37

 And even though the most effective
90-Day Inial Wellhead
Barrels of Oil Equivalent (BOED)

flowback analysis strategies require the

Producon Rates in Eagle Ford use of high-rate data gathering systems
1,000
1,000 at the wellhead, the capital investment
remains modest compared with other
750
diagnostic technologies. For instance,
downhole fiber-optic systems cost
500 Average: 440 BOED
about USD 1 million per installation and
250 microseismic surveys may run between
USD2million and USD 5 million, which
0 is why their use is typically limited to a
Devon Peers select number of pilot wells.
Obviously, flowback analysis is cheap-
After implementing a unique flowback and production strategy that uses
er and simpler than other techniques,
high-frequency data acquisition, Devon Energys 90-day production rates
in the Eagle Ford Shale soared above the competition. Graphic courtesy of said Hassan Dehghanpour, an assistant
DevonEnergy. professor at the University of Alberta
(UA), who is conducting research with a
remarkable improvements in early pro- than the ones drilled since. Its com- consortium of Canadian shale producers.
duction. Located in the heart of the Eagle pletion strategy has not changed that The whole idea is that we have this data
Ford Shales oil and condensate window, mucheither. that people measure after opening the
the company acquired its acreage there The big differences in the initial and well, but we need to have a representative
in 2013 and has since doubled the 30-day 90-day production rates have resulted model to integrate the data.
initial production rates to 1,950 BOEPD. from using flowback analysis to devise The models developed so far by Deh-
In that same span, the 90-day rates a new approach to choke management. ghanpour and others are capable of fore-
increased by 87% to 1,000BOEPDthe I would challenge that if there is any casting a wells production based on just
highest figure in the continental US, and completion technique or technology that the first few days of flowback. These
125% higher than the industry average resulted in this kind of production uplift, serve as critical early warning systems for
in the rest of the Eagle Ford, according we would be up here talking about that multimillion-dollar developments. After
to Devon. technology vs. the production strategy, a well is fractured and starts flowback,
Like all shale producers, the com- said Toby Deen, an operations engineer producers can input the data and quickly
pany high grades its acreage, meaning with Devon, during a presentation at the generate a ballpark figure to determine
that the lower performing wells from recent SPE Annual Technical Conference whether early well designs will be profit-
2013 were actually drilled in better rock and Exhibition in Houston. able, breakeven, or losers.

100,000 300,000

90,000
30-Day Cumulative Production (BOE)

90-Day Cumulative Production (BOE)

250,000
80,000

70,000
200,000
60,000

50,000 150,000

40,000
100,000
30,000

20,000
50,000
10,000

0 0
Jan-12 Jun-12 Dec-12 Jun-13 Dec-13 Jun-14 Dec-14 Jun-15 Jan-12 Jun-12 Dec-12 Jun-13 Dec-13 Jun-14 Dec-14 Jun-15
Date of First Production Date of First Production
Legacy Strategy Delayed Strategy New Strategy Legacy Strategy Delayed Strategy New Strategy

Data from every oil and condensate well Devon Energy operates that began producing from January 2012 to March
2015 show an average production increase of 100% for 30-day and an 87% increase for 90-day cumulative production in
wells using a new strategy based on flowback analysis. Graphic courtesy of Devon Energy.

38 JPT DECEMBER 2015

 If the numbers look bad, a producer
may need to adjust the fracture treat-
ment. And while not all changes will yield
higher production, they could improve
the economics.
If you know that pumping in more
water during fracturing does not neces-
sarily give you more effective fractures,
then you can cut back on that cost,
said Obinna Ezulike, a research assis-
tant at UA, who is also working with
theconsortium.
As beneficial as flowback analysis is,
it is not threatening to disrupt the other
more expensive diagnostic technologies.
Rather, Ezulike said, it should be seen as
another effective tool that companies can
widely apply to improve fracture designs.
Unconventional reservoirs are a hard
instrument to play, he said. There is
so much uncertainty everywhere, so you
need a complementary analysis using all
that you can get. Because the Horn River Basin area in British Columbia, Canada, is only
accessible in the winter, engineers rely on flowback analysis to quickly
Devons Flowback Strategy improvewell and completion designs. Photo courtesy of Nexen Energy.
It is important to emphasize that Devon
is using flowback analysis to speed up ini- choke sizes to reduce the risk of damag- ing the release of flowback often meant
tial production, not to increase ultimate ing the well. the difference between a live well and a
recovery. From the companys perspec- Devon says its unique approach is to dead one.
tive, the sooner high volumes of hydro- ditch these schedules and instead use Crafton, who is also an SPE distin-
carbons are extracted from its wells, the near real-time flowback and production guished lecturer and author of several
sooner they turn a profit. monitoring to predict when well damage SPE papers on flowback, coined the term
The capital investment is already in will occur, and then respond by increas- slowback to describe how his clients
the ground, explained Deen. So our ing the choke size. in the Haynesville managed to overcome
goal with flowback is to maximize our With this approach, tiny changes reap their early failures. While working for an
time-sensitive economics without crater- huge rewards. When it first tested this operator there, he found that crews were
ing the well. strategy, Devon changed the choke size in being paid bonuses to get the flowing sur-
Devon refers to its strategy as both one well from 14/64 in. to 20/64 in. and the face pressure of gas wells from 1,000 psi
managed drawdown and choke manage- production rate nearly doubled. to 2,000 psi down to the line pressure of
ment. The basic idea is to use chokes at The company also developed a sys- 300 psi within 36 hours.
the wellhead to maintain as much bot- tem to adjust the chokes in just a few I started looking at the production
tomhole pressure as possible, which seconds compared with the old system histories and you could see these were
delays fractures from closing and keeps that required a well to be shut in for half awesome completions, he said. But
oil and gas flowing up to the surface on an hour or longer. Devon is now explor- when they would impose that enormous
its own for a longer period. This also mit- ing ways to implement similar flowback pressure drop, the wells were ruined.
igates the production that may be lost analysis and choke management pro- The trick was to slow down the flowback
from unwanted, but very common events grams across the company. stage, he said. This practice of slowback
such as a frac hit suffered during the became widely adopted by major play-
completion of an offset well. Initial Production ers in the Haynesville that have credit-
If the choke strategy is too aggressive, or Increased Recovery? ed it with increasing ultimate recovery
then too much lifting pressure is lost, In general, the practice of managing ratesby 5%.
which cuts into a wells recovery factor flowback to protect a fracture job in a Crafton believes this type of flowback
and may lead to a wellbore collapse. With horizontal well is not new. Gas produc- management that maximizes recovery
that in mind, almost all shale producers ers working the Haynesville Shale, a will deliver much greater value to the
use a conservative method that relies on relatively soft formation in Louisiana, shale business than the strategies that
predetermined schedules for graduating learned several years ago that manag- drive up initial production, something he

JPT DECEMBER 2015 39

 acknowledges may be more attractive to
a producers investors.
A gentle flowback results in high
[estimated ultimate recovery], and a
lower risk to well damage Crafton said.
But the downside is that slower flowback
means a lower short-term rate of return.
So its all about company philosophy,
he said.
Future Planning With Flowback
Flowback analysis is also an integral part
of Nexens development plan at its Horn
River Basin acreage located in the north-
ernmost area of British Columbia, Can-
ada. Operating in this part of the coun-
try presents logistical issues due to the
extreme environment. As spring temper-
atures rise and the winter ice thaws, the
ground becomes too soft for drilling rigs
to move around easily.
This leaves Nexen with a narrow win-
dow of opportunity to drill and complete
wells while the ground is still frozen.
It also leaves little time for the trial-
and-error process involved with iden-
tifying the best completion designs.
Claudio Virues, a reservoir engineer at
Nexen, explained the situation: If we are
spending money next year, our optimi-
Salty Flowback Research May Explain Fluid Movement in Shale
A nother area of great interest to
those researching flowback is the
interaction of water and salt inside the
shale reservoir. After a well is stimu-
lated, the flowback fluids tend to show
a rising concentration of salt that falls
back to near zero over time.
The goal is to analyze this salt concen-
tration curve to determine the complex-
ity of a wells fracture network. This is
important since complex fractures are
estimated to have a flowing surface area
of 50 to 1,000 times greater than a sim-
pler, or planar, fracture.
The applications for this area of study
could be far reaching because nearly
all North American shale plays were
once covered by salty seas. As the water
evaporated over the eons, the salt was
left behind. In some shales, the salt is
40
zation decisions have to come 9 months
before thatand we are talking about
100-million-dollardecisions.
So the old way meant that the com-
pany had to wait up to 6 months to
obtain enough production data to make
changes on the following years well
designs. With flowback data, the cycle
of data acquisition to decision making
is shortened to 2 months or less, which
allows changes to be made in the same
drillingseason.
Some of the changes Nexen has made
based on flowback data include deter-
mining the optimal number of stages
needed in a lateral section and in which
wells to use less proppant while getting
the same production results as older off-
set wells. It has also helped detect when
infill and parent wells are communicat-
ing, and if so, how to space them for opti-
mal reservoir drainage.
Nexens overall Horn River develop-
ment plan is to tap into three different
shale layers using pads with as many
as 20 wells. Virues said the company
is looking into how flowback analysis
may help engineers figure out the best
way to do that. You have to have an
understanding of which formation you
contained in formation water, but not
always. So figuring out how exactly
that salt ends up in the wellstream may
explain how oil and gas move through
the shale matrix, into the fracture net-
work, and eventually the wellbore.
The University of Alberta (UA)
researchers are using core samples from
different Canadian shales to model the
increased fracture area based on the dis-
solved salt content in the flowback fluid.
So far, they have established three types
of salt that may explain how it moves:
loosely attached, moderately attached,
and strongly attached.
We are doing a lot of research on the
source of salt and its really challenging,
said Hassan Dehghanpour, an assistant
professor at UA. But, if we know the
source of the salt, then the question
are going to flow back first, and how that
is going to impair production, he said.
Is it the bottom one, the middle one, or
the top one, and why?
The company is studying several other
ways to leverage flowback data. One of
them involves analyzing the chemistry
of flowback fluids to quickly determine
how fractures are performing. Nexen
is working on this and other aspects
with UA as part of the consortium that
includes Encana, Cenovus Energy, Atha-
basca Oil, FMC Technologies, and Trican
WellServices.
For Further Reading
SPE 119894 Modeling Flowback Behavior
or Flowback Equals Slowback
by J.W. Crafton, Performance Sciences.
SPE 174831 Maximizing Well Deliverability
in the Eagle Ford Shale Through
Flowback Operations by T. Deen,
J.Daal, and J. Tucker, Devon Energy.
SPE 175143 Flowback Fracture Closure:
A Key Factor for Estimating Effective
Pore-Volume by D.O. Ezulike,
O.A.Adefidipe, Y. Fu, University
ofAlberta, et al.
becomes how to upscale what we know
from the lab observation to the field.
If the salt is dissolved from the frac-
tures, then it might be increasing per-
meability. However, researchers at the
University of Houston (UH) believe as
the injected water is produced back
over time, more salt may leach out from
the shale matrix and crystallize in pore
throats, fractures, and even the spac-
es between the proppant, decreasing
thepermeability.
Hoagie Merry, a petroleum engineer
who researched dissolved salt content
in flowback fluids for his masters thesis
program at UH, believes if this dissolved
salt theory can be proven by analyzing
the flowback and production chemistry,
producers may have cheaper options for
restimulating a well.
JPT DECEMBER 2015

Developed with scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray
spectroscopy, elemental maps of the salts found in flowback water from
an Evie Lake shale well in Canada reveal their complex composition. Image
courtesy of the University of Alberta.
Instead of refracturing with prop-
pant and everything else, we think they
could try refracturing with fresh water,
redissolving that salt in the main frac-
ture and secondary fracture systems and
perhaps even a little bit more salt in the
formation, and obtain a larger dissolved
stimulated rock volume and reactivate
the salt that precipitated out, which was
costing you permeability, he said.
Letting It Soak In: Delaying Flowback Delivers Unique Results
O n the far end of the flowback spec-
trum is a completion process
called soakback. Instead of allowing the
well to flow back right after completion,
some operators are forced to shut in their
wells for months at a time until take-
away capacity is available. The comple-
tion fluids then soak into the shale rock.
What happens during that process is still
being debated, but flowback analysis may
provide some answers.
Robert Hawkes, the corporate direc-
tor of reservoir solutions at Trican Well
Service, has been studying the issue for
the past few years and collaborates with
the research team at the University of
Alberta. He is pushing a controversial
theory, which holds that, in many cases,
the water used in stimulation treat-
ments is not a damaging mechanism for
shale reservoirs. Hawkes said his idea
is supported by a number of Canadian
operators that have recently come to the
same conclusion.
JPT DECEMBER 2015
The other question that UH research-
ers are working on is whether a pro-
ducer wants to see salt at all. We think
probably not, Merry said. But in cases
where it is simply unavoidable, produc-
ers may be able to use openhole logs to
determine which parts of a field have the
highest salt content and incorporate that
information into their economic models.
There is much more cost at the surface
Among the most common fears is
that the water swells the clays inside
the shale, which then leads to fracture
damage. Yet, in the past 15 years, weve
been putting a ton of water in these same
reservoirs and getting good results,
Hawkes said. He thinks such results have
been possible because the mixed fab-
ric of shale can tolerate vast volumes
ofwater.
This mixture of clay and stronger
materials might also explain why produc-
tion sometimes comes on very strong in
gas wells where flowback is commenced
months after the completion. In one gas
well that was shut in for a year after com-
pletion, the initial production rate was
five times that of a similar offset well
brought on just days aftercompletion.
Hawkes said in many other instanc-
es, shut-in wells are observed to have
very clean wellbores, which indicates
that the propped fractures healed around
the near-wellbore area instead of being
in treating the water to knock the salt out
and dispose of it, he said.
In high-salt parts of the field, opera-
tors may also opt for initial fracturing
jobs that use a greater amount of fresh
water to dissolve as much salt as pos-
sible to increase the performance of the
well. If you got your lease there and
you want to drill it out, I think its prob-
ably beneficial to know if its salty, how
youre going to deal with it, Merry said.
For Further Reading
SPE 168598 Fracture Characterization
Using Flowback Salt-Concentration
Transient by A. Zolfaghari,
H. Dehghanpour, E. Ghanbari,
University of Alberta, et al.
SPE 175061 Model for a Shale Gas
Formation with Salt-Sealed Natural
Fractures by H. Merry, Sentinel
Technology Solutions, C.A. Ehligh-
Economides, University of Houston,
and P. Wei, Sinopec Research Institute
of Petroleum Engineering.
flushed out, which is often the case dur-
ing normal flowback operations.
Thats where the eureka moment was
for me, he said. My approach is if you
can keep it shut in and you dont mind
losing the water, thats to your bene-
fit and its not going to be detrimental,
which is really unconventional thinking
for all of us.
So while this leads to a stronger initial
well performance, what operators are
not saying is whether soaking enhances
recovery rates. However, soaked wells
may be more economically beneficial
since they incur less water disposal costs
for the first few months of the wells life.
Of course, a high degree of patience
on the part of the operator is required to
realize such a benefit. Hawkes said the
biggest issue with soaking at the moment
is that its almost impossible for reser-
voir simulators to account for the phys-
ics, which makes it hard to determine
where it may apply.
41
 Following Flowback With Chemical Tracers

R ising demand for flowback tech-

nologies that reduce the uncer-
tainties associated with horizontal shale
wells is also leading to the creation of
more hydrocarbon and water tracers.
Used to identify the source of produc-
tion in a well, these chemical-based trac-
ers may play an important role in the
shale industrys effort to come up with
more cost-effective fracture designs.
The tracers are deployed downhole
along with the sand or proppant mate-
rial that is being pumped into the frac-
tures. The chemical compounds are
tailored to flow with oil or the water
produced in oil and gas wells. Unlike
radioactive tracers, which require a well
to be shut in for a log run, chemical trac-
ers are sampled at the wellhead in con-
tinuous intervals during the flowback
A multiwell cutaway shows how chemical tracers analyze the flowback process
and production periods and then ana-
and identify the production and interactions of different zones. Image courtesy
lyzed in a laboratory. of CoreLabs ProTechnics Division.
For production analysis, the concen-
tration of the tracers that flows back to
the surface over time can determine the marily using chemical tracers to deter- have a unique tracer per segment or per
effectiveness of each stage. All things mine whether any production was com- stage, if possible, for each well.
being equal, on a 30-stage well, the trac- ing from the toe of a wellthe area of For example, on a pad with six wells,
ers from each stage would represent the lateral section believed to contribute each well may have 25 stages, which
between 3% and 4% of the total con- the least overall production. would require 150 different tracers to
centration of tracer material sent down- The number of stages and the num- identify each stage from each well. Since
hole. But in reality, that is hardly ever ber of clusters per stage has significant- that number of individual tracers does
the case. ly changed since the beginning, said not exist, a single tracer is used in dif-
We see cases where stages are pro- Ramos. Now, 20 to 30 stages is normal, ferent well segments to detect commu-
ducing 10%, 12%, or 14%, and others and 50 stages is not too outside of nor- nication: one tracer for the heel, one
where there is hardly any1% or less, mal. He added that some companies for the middle section, and one for
said Claudio Ramos, a region engineer- are even experimenting with 80, 90, the toe, and then repeat this for each
ing adviser with CoreLabs ProTechnics and 100 stages. well. For a pad site with six wells, this
diagnostic service. Another factor driving demand is makes it possible to do the job with only
ProTechnics began the year with that many shale producers have moved 18 tracers.
10 oil tracers, 10 gas tracers, and 14 into the infill development stage, which ProTechnics advises a minimum flow-
water tracers. This fall, those numbers involves drilling wells closer together back sampling period of 90 days to get a
increased to 28, 15, and 29, respectively. to produce as much as possible from fair assessment of well behavior. How-
By early next year, the company plans to their acreage. Also becoming increas- ever, lately, we have been asked more
have 34 tracers for oil and water, and, ingly common are stacked drilling pro- often about what is happening with pro-
hopefully, more gas tracers as well. grams that target different formations duction 6 to 9 months after the frac,
This rapid pace of development is at different depth intervals from the Ramos said.
being driven largely by the growing same pad site. To extend the analysis period, he said,
number of fracture stages that shale So now, they want to know whats the sometimes a double dose of tracer mate-
producers are placing in horizontal vertical communication between these rial is used to distribute detectable con-
wells. The first multistage shale wells wells and whats the lateral communica- centrations for up to a year. In at least
drilled several years ago had about three tion between these wells, said Ramos. one case, ProTechnics has been able to
stages separated by 2,000 ft or 3,000 ft. And this presents us with the need for recover tracers 22 months after produc-
At that time, most companies were pri- more tracers because often we want to tion began. JPT

42 JPT DECEMBER 2015

 Drilling Wells Ever Faster May
Not Be the Measure of Success
Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor

T
he standard for progress in shale gy Practice, raised a seemingly sim-
development has been the dras- ple question: Having good directional
tic reduction in the number of control gives you better wellbore qual-
days needed to drill a well, from more ity. I wonder why we are not measuring
than 20 to less than 5 in some unconven- thatsystematically?
tional plays. But some question whether No one at the ATCE or since has
it has become a misleading metric for an offered a simple formula to answer that
industry needing more productive wells. question. The measure of a produc-
The human tendency is to optimize tive wellbore will vary based on
within a given constraint. Right now, it is corporate business models and
reaching the total depth in the shortest the opinions of exploration
time, said Robello Samuel, technology and production experts
fellow, drilling, at Halliburton. If all you from a variety of disci-
care about is that quantification, you do plines, often with con-
not worry about tool damage or wellbore flicting points of view.
quality, or what it is like to complete it. To a geologist, what
Maximizing drilling performance and constitutes a produc-
efficiency is not the same as optimizing tive wellbore leans
it, he said. toward geosteering
Everyone needs to remember why to guide the hole
they are drilling the hole. As much oil through the most pro-
and gas needs to come out as possible, ductive rock, which
said Bart Critser, geosteering manag- can run counter to
er for Terra Guidance. Otherwise its the goals of a produc-
just a multimillion dollar, fancy hole in tion engineer worried
theground. that the ups and downs
The payoff for drilling faster has large- of a tortuous wellbore
ly been realized. While further time sav- will lead to long-term
ings are possible, the discounts now blockages. It is often
offered by service companies hungry hard to put a dollar value
for work have slashed the potential sav- on some potentially
ings. In September, the day rate for a
typical rig in the Permian Basin was
USD 18,000, according to Hart Energy Subsidence in a
Market Intelligence. That is equivalent to producing oil field
likely caused
only 360bbl of oil at USD 50/bbl. tubing (orange)
Saving a day of drilling is a bad trade inside two
if the hole quality suffers. The downsides casing strings
of a badly drilled well can range from to corkscrew.
casing damage and pump breakdowns, This example
of extreme
to missed sweet spots and accumula- tortuosity
tions of sand in low spots slowing the was imaged
flow, according to drilling experts at the using
recent SPE Annual Technical Conference Gyrodatas
and Exhibition (ATCE) held in Houston, Micro-Guide
service.
and in interviews since. Graphic
One of them, Moray Laing, oil and courtesy of
gas lead for the SAS Americas Ener- Gyrodata.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 43

 costly long-term side effects of a poorly
drilledwell.
The objectives of the departments
doing drilling, fracturing, and produc-
tion are not the same, said Robert Shel-
ley, director for well performance evalu-
ation at StrataGen, Carbos fracturing
consulting arm. Drilling is measur-
ing the dollars per foot. The goals for
completions and production are a little
moreabstract.
Simple Incentives
There is anecdotal evidence that hasty
drilling can reduce productivity later
and substantially increase maintenance
costs. For example, a US operator recent-
ly used SAS advanced analytics to look
for patterns in maintenance data, seek-
ing ways to reduce downtime in horizon-
tal wells where rod pumps were rapidly
wearing holes through the tubing.
The study showed that the root cause
of more than 80% of the tubing failures
were curves so tight that the centraliz-
ers on the rods could not hold them off
the tubing in that dogleg. The obvious
assumption is they drilled too hard, too
fast, with too much dogleg, Laing said.
This case bears a striking resem-
blance to problems reported 30 years
ago in several heavy oil fields in Alber-
ta by C-FER Technologies. The technol-
ogy development and testing organiza-
tion also found that tightly drilled curves
caused the rod strings driving downhole
pumps to wear holes in the tubing, with
failures within weeks, or even days.
In both cases, drillers said they
were responding to the incentives that
rewarded faster drilling. In the 1980s,
there were even races, with steak dinner
offered to the team that drilled the fast-
est directional well that day, said Cam
Matthews, a C-FER fellow. While crews
in shale plays are not competing for din-
ner, bonus payments are still based on
drilling speed.
We tend to forget what we learned
years ago, Matthews said. The panic to
get as many holes in the ground as quick-
ly as we can is a big factor, distracting
operators from a focus on holequality.
Drilling has generally slowed com-
pared to the peak of the unconvention-
al boom. Back then, the rate of pene-
44
tration could exceed the ability of the
tools used by geosteering consultants to
advise drillers on where the target for-
mation is located.
I have been involved in a few proj-
ects where, as the geosteering specialist,
I was at the brink of begging the driller
to slow down, Critser said. Once they
drill over 250 ft/hr, a lot of the high-qual-
ity data become useless.
The US is not alone in this struggle.
In many oil places across the planet,
geologists are rewarded for production
quality, and engineers are rewarded for
speed, he said. The struggle between
geology and engineering plagues the
industry as a whole.
Engineers are not all on the same side.
Those in charge of completing and pro-
ducing the wells complain about the
obstacles they encounter in the wells that
they inherit from drilling. I suspect what
we continue to do is we offer no incentive
to do anything different, regardless of
what happens. That has got to change; it
is costing too much money, Critser said.
Quality Measures
The bottom-line argument for change
from Edward Stockhausen, a corporate
geosteering and well planning special-
ist for Chevron known for his ceaseless
campaign to better measure and control
drilling, is that proper wellbore position
improves reservoir value.
When corporate earnings are re-
leased, though, the focus remains on
faster drilling. Recently, Anadarko
Petroleums chief executive officer
(CEO), Al Walker, mentioned the com-
panys enhanced wellbore design, but
described its value by discussing how it
reduced drilling times and the cost-per-
foot by nearly 15%.
For consultants, wellbore problems
remain a steady source of work. Mat-
thews said C-FER has been working
on a joint industry project to identify
the maximum bend that can be toler-
ated by an electric submersible pump
during installation and operation. The
work includes a study comparing the
well path promised compared to what
wasdelivered.
Matthews sees a range of drilling
quality-management efforts, from large
Rod String Tension (T)
Concentrated
Normal
Contact Force
Radius of
Centralizer Curvature
Spacing (R)
(L)
Uniformly Distributed
Normal Contact Force
Concentrated
Normal
Contact Force
Rod String Tension (T)
Illustration from a Canadian study
(SPE 22852) showing how tight
curves in wellbores can lead to rapid
tubing wear. Illustration courtesy of
C-FER Technologies.
savvy companies with drilling depart-
ments that set standards and ensure
they are delivered, to small operators
whose oversight depends on the skill of
the superintendent they send to awell.
Efforts to improve well productivity
would benefit if more information was
shared on problems and solutions, he
said. C-FER is working to put together a
joint industry project to collect wellbore
and pump performance information in
the Permian Basin.
You have got to keep things in front
of people by using data and information
from fields, he said. A wider view can
quantify what you need to do.
As unconventional explorers have
learned that production in these huge
formations requires hitting sweet spots,
they have adopted tools used in con-
ventional formations to steer through
the best rock, such as gamma ray
loggingtools.
Clients are trying to drill more pre-
cisely, said Iain Wilson, CEO for Geo-
Steering. The [gamma log] tools have
been around for 20 years, but innova-
tion is making them cheap and readily
available, which increases their use for
unconventional drilling.
JPT DECEMBER 2015
 Well Quality Matters
Problems that can be caused by wellbore quality
issues include:
Motor
The margin of error on drilling can put wells
outside the most productive zone. Protector Displacement
Poorly located wells can end up outside the lease Transducers
lines, leading to potential litigation or regulatory Intake
action.
The resistance created by crooked (tortuous)
wellbores increases the difficulty of running Pump
casing in long horizontal wells.
In extremely tortuous wells, casing sometimes
does not reach the end of the well, reducing
the production zone, or is damaged during
installation.
It is more difficult to achieve a quality cement
seal when casing is up against the walls of a
undulating wellbore.
Operating an electric submersible pump in even
a slight curve in a wellbore (more than 23 per
100 ft) can lead to an early failure.
Tight curves (severe doglegs) can put rods used
to drive pumps into damaging contact with
tubing.
Extreme doglegs can block or break tools and
Hydraulic Ram
pumps.
Rising and falling wellbores (porpoising) can Load Cell
cause severe gas slugging and flow assurance
issues as well as leave low spots where solids
cancollect.
An electric submersible pump was bent in this test to
Inaccurate well path information built into
measure how much it could curve before the strain on its
reservoir models can yield misleading results.
parts caused an early failure. Photo courtesy of C-FER
Technologies.

Drillers are also being asked to drill
longer laterals stretching out 2 miles or
more within moving target zones. Devon
Energy, which has been involved since
the beginning of unconventional devel-
opment in the Barnett Shale, turned to
geosteering several years ago when it
began developing the Woodford Shale in
Oklahoma, said Bill Wheaton, a produc-
tion engineer in exploration and strate-
gic services for Devon.
Geosteering had not been needed in
the Barnett, which is extremely thick
and easily fractured, making precise well
paths less critical. In the Woodford, geo-
steering was required to ensure the well
reached the more productive spots.
Devon is one of the bigger compa-
nies using analytics to set standards for
building and managing wells to increase
productivity, Wheaton said. Its drilling
control centers put drilling and geo-
steering experts side by side to balance
the sometimes conflicting goals of drill-
ing a relatively smooth wellbore that
also comes in contact with the maximum
amount of productive rock as it moves up
or down.
Critical Conversations
There is no handbook that describes the
characteristics of the most productive
wellbore. The key performance indica-
tors would need to be defined by the
company operating the well, said Fred
Florence, president of Rig Operations.
In my opinion, each operator will have
their own criteria based on the impact to
each ones bottom line.
Consultants who work with operators
say the first step toward greater produc-
tivity is to get those who manage drilling
talking to those in completions and pro-
duction about their definition of a pro-
ductive well.
There is a major disconnect between
drilling engineers and production, said
John de Wardt, president of de Wardt &
Company. The consulting firm advised
a company operating in South America
to reorganize its drilling operations to
increase cooperation among the drilling,
completions, and production depart-
ments. The result was a 66% reduction
in well costs and a 20% rise in produc-
tion, he said.
Laing points out that the asset man-
agers approving drilling should use that
authority to set the standards of the well
to be drilled. It is a two-way street, de
Wardt said. Those in completions and
production need to say this is the prod-
uct I want delivered to me.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 45

 Geosteering advisers are hired to keep
drilling within specific target zones, but
Critser said in some cases, they have to
elicit specific directions from an explo-
ration team.
Our company has been asked to steer
target windows from 5 to 50 ft, Crits-
er said. With a large target window, if
the geologist tries to tell us that a bore-
hole anywhere in that zone should be
fine, we will try to define a subtarget of
about 10ft and base our target decisions
onthat.
We always get suspicious when
a drilling engineer tells us that being
out of zone slightly is okay because the
fracking will still penetrate the win-
dow, hesaid.
The Search for Measures of Drilling Imperfection
T he only wells that are straight or
follow a smooth curve are in the
pictures in well plans. Real wellbores
are shaped by the mechanics of direc-
tional drilling tools, the skills and atten-
tion of drillers, the force of gravity, and
the path followed by hydrocarbon-rich
seams ofrock.
Well path modeling commonly gen-
erates smooth curves, whereas an actual
well contains severe doglegs and other
irregularities, said Robello Samuel,
technology fellow, drilling, at Hallibur-
ton. A major interest for Samuel is cre-
ating measures to address a problem
he raised in a 2009 paper (SPE 124710):
There are not clear criterion for defin-
ing the quality of the wellbore.
There are several companies with
methods for estimating the friction-
al force added by irregular wellbores,
which grew out of the long-standing
effort to more accurately measure
the path of narrow holes drilled
milesunderground.
They are seeking more realistic mea-
sures of wellbore quality than those
offered by established formulas, such as
the minimum curvature method, which
assumes the well follows a smooth curve
based on the shortest possible radius
from the previous measurement point.
46
On the job, geosteering consultants
have to translate geologic interpreta-
tions of gamma logs into language that
the drilling decision makers understand
andtrust.
In the past year, Gyrodata has adapt-
ed its gyroscope-based survey sys-
tem to create a service called Micro-
Guide, which creates a detailed 3D
image of the wells based on foot-by-
foot measurements after they have
been drilled.
These images show features missed
by measurement-while-drilling sur-
veys that are usually taken every 90 ft,
which tend to offer a smoother view of
wellbores. The more detailed images
have helped clients diagnose problems,
It is an elegant formula, but years of
experience and testing have shown that
it poorly describes the work of rota-
ry steerable tools or directional drill-
ing tools using bent mud motors to
build curves. In the process, the data
sent back to the surface can lead to
errors in critical measures, particularly
in the total vertical depth. The level of
uncertainty is greater when using a bent
housing, but neither tool is immune
toerror.
Crooked wellbores may undulate
with doglegs, spiraling, and washouts.
In a word, it is tortuous. Rocks can
test a drillers ability to keep drilling
on course. Gravity also can also alter
the course of the drill bit to below the
planned course.
Drilling advances that made it pos-
sible to target smaller deposits have
complicated drill bit navigation. Using
directional drilling to follow the unpre-
dictable path of a pay zone introduces
well tortuosity almost by design, said
Cam Matthews, a fellow at C-FER Tech-
nologies, a not-for-profit oil industry
research and testing center.
Adding to the uncertainty was the
advent of topdrives, which allowed
larger rigs to add 90 ft of pipe at a
time to the drillstring, compared
such as early pump failures caused by
overly tight turns, said David Moore, a
senior account manager and artificial
lift placement specialist for Gyrodata.
These [well evaluations] are really
appreciated more by completion and
production engineers than by the drill-
er. Actually, it is disliked by some drill-
ers, said Steve Mullin, director of mar-
keting for Gyrodata.
For completions and production engi-
neers, the data have aided their work by
identifying obstructions and providing
information to better model the force
needed to insert hardware into the well.
For the drillers, it offers a detailed cri-
tique of their work, showing both the
good and the bad.
to only 30-ft segments on rigs equipped
with a kelly drive. An unintended down-
side was the reduction in the number
of times that data are gathered to once
every 90 ft, when the mud pumps are
turned off forconnections.
The red bands
show spiraling
on the well
wall. This image,
created using
Halliburtons
CAST ultrasonic
tool, reveals a well
quality problem that
can interfere with
hole cleaning during
drilling, add to the
force needed to run
casing, and alter the
flow of cement, making
it harder to create an
even seal around the
well. Image courtesy of
Halliburton.
JPT DECEMBER 2015
 In 1993, Matthews coauthored a paper
(SPE 22852) warning of the measure-
ment errors that could be introduced
by wider gaps between survey measure-
ments. Edward Stockhausen, a geo-
steering specialist for Chevron, spent
years working to identify the potential
magnitude of such errors, which could
lead to an error of 25 ft in total verti-
cal depth, according to a 2003 paper
(SPE 79917).
A problem with a bent-angle motor
is the potential introduction of small
errors each time it switches from sliding
to rotating mode to drill forward. While
rotary steerable tools are less prone to
error, they are not not immune. Dur-
ing a panel discussion at the recent SPE
Annual Technical Conference and Exhi-
bition, Stockhausen said using both sta-
tionary measures and streams of con-
tinuous location measures offer a more
accurate fix on location, but he is still
seeking a satisfactory formula for com-
bining the two.
The payoff for Stockhausens dogged
pursuit of errors can be significant. In
a large, offshore field driven by water
rising from below, a 1-foot difference in
the total vertical depth, can change the
ultimate oil recovered by 100,000 bbl,
which even at the current low price is
worth nearly USD 5 million.
At the ATCE, he presented recent
work demonstrating small measure-
ment errors in logging tools equipped
with two gamma rays (SPE 175048),
which if unnoticed could significantly
reduce the rock contacted when geo-
steering through a formation.
The significant thing is if you do not
pay attention to what you do, you are
going to get the same things [errors]
over and over, Stockhausen said.
New Tools
As improved measurement tools reveal
smaller wellbore features, there is a
growing body of work aimed at measur-
ing the physical effect of the flaws.
There have long been quality mea-
sures such as the drilling difficulty
index and the wellbore quality score-
card. None satisfy Samuel whose focus
is on developing formulas to drill
more systematically, as evidenced
JPT DECEMBER 2015
by his book, 501 Solved Problems
for Drilling.
The drawback of the available mea-
sures, he said, is that they are concep-
tually similar to medical ratings, which
rank symptoms to assess if a patient is at
risk of a heart attack, but do not provide
direct evidence of the condition. These
subjective measures leave it up to the
whims of users to decide how much
weight to apply to them, Samuel said.
Samuel developed a mathematical
formula to calculate the energy required
to overcome friction caused by a tor-
tuous wellbore, which is termed well
profile energy by Halliburton. It uses
the well survey data gathered every
90ft to model the well path and calcu-
lates the minimum energy needed to
move an elastic beam through a hole in
thatshape.
The company is working to build it
into dashboards used by drillers so they
can see how the twists and turns of the
wellbore being drilled will affect the
torque and drag required to push casing
into the wellbore.
With a scorecard, it is rated high or
low. When you do well profile energy, it
is mathematical and physical, Samuel
said. In an interview, he showed a dis-
play under development with a graph-
ic of a drillstring moving horizontally
surrounded by bubbles displaying data,
including the torque and drag added by
wellbore tortuosity as of that point.
Halliburton is also directly mea-
suring wellbore geometry effects by
installing strain gauges in bottomhole
assemblies that measure the magnitude
and direction of the force caused by
wellboreirregularities.
And it is competing with Schlum-
berger, which has published papers
on quantifying the effect of tortuosi-
ty and is looking for ways to improve
drillingtools.
Gyrodata, which is known for making
a line of precise well survey tools based
on gyroscopes, has developed a method
to use foot-by-foot wellbore measure-
ments, which are used to create a 3D
model to calculate the physical effect
oftortuosity.
The method outlined in a paper early
this year (SPE 173103) has inspired a
growing number of its applications by
engineers managing completions and
production, said Steve Mullin, director
of marketing for GyroData.
New data will spark new arguments
about what it means. Samuel pointed
out that many of the small variations
in the well path are often not observ-
able inside the stiff walls of casing. Mul-
lin responds that users will find value
in details not seen in standard surveys
done every 90 ft to 100 ft.
A 100-ft survey gives the impres-
sion that the well is smooth. Usually it
is not smooth, Mullin said. Our sur-
vey is showing all the bends between
thosepoints. JPT
For Further Reading
SPE 22852 Drilling and Production
Practices To Mitigate Sucker Rod/
Tubing Wear-Related Failures in
Directional Wells by C.M. Matthews
and L.J. Dunn, C-FER.
SPE 79917 Continuous Direction and
Inclination Measurements Lead to an
Improvement in Wellbore Positioning
by E. Stockhausen, ChevronTexaco,
and W.G. Lesso Jr., Schlumberger.
SPE 124710 Wellbore Drilling Indices,
Tortuosity, Torsion, and Energy: What
Do They Have To Do With Wellpath
Design? by R. Samuel, Halliburton,
and X. Liu, Sinopec.
SPE 173039 Strain-Gauge Bending-
Moment Measurements Used to
Identify Wellbore Tortuosity by
C. Marland and J. Greenwood,
Halliburton.
SPE 173103 Wellbore Tortuosity Analyzed
by a Novel Method May Help to
Improve Drilling, Completion, and
Production Operations by J. Bang,
O. Jegbefume. and A. Ledroz,
Gyrodata, et al.
SPE 175048 Computation of Apparent
Formation Dip From Single Azimuth
Sensor Data Having Different Depths
of Investigation by E. Stockhausen,
Chevron; and J. Rasmus and S. Bammi,
Schlumberger.
47
 Q&A
Mikhail Chertenkov, Deputy CEO of Field Development
Technology, Lukoil-Engineering
Abdelghani Henni, JPT Middle East Editor
The Yarega heavy oil field is an tions from the processes, and significant-
example of Russias technical ly improved workplace health and safety
advancements in heavy oil and protection. The counterflow SAGD also
bitumen production. Describe the allowed us to develop new areas in the
technologies deployed in the field Yarega field that were not prepared by
andtheir effects on production. functioning mines.
Due to the requirements for high oil
production rates and final oil recov- What are the benefits of using
ery factors, we applied a counterflow thermal production technologies?
steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) In the Yarega field, there is no alternative
technology in Yarega, which resulted in to thermal methods for oil production.
even reservoir coverage by thermal expo- The majority of the nonthermal devel-
sure, higher oil production rates, and opment technologies for heavy oil fields
lower steam/oil ratio values. Modeling are known to be economically inefficient.
results also had shown higher expected Lukoil is working on improving thermal
final oil recovery factors. methods for production in its heavy oil
A surface/underground thermal fields. We have set a goal to increase oil
oil mining field development method production rates by 40% and final recov-
is in common use in the Yarega field. ery factors by 10% by developing the
The oil production performance indi- currently employed methods and apply-
ces of the oil mining method were sig- ing new approaches and technologies in
nificantly improved by the follow- pilot project programs.
ingmeasures:
The lengths of horizontal wells What are the lessons learned in using
drilled from underground mines vertical drilling rigs and rack-type
were tripled due to new directional rigs at the field?
drilling systems, thus oil rates from The main issues associated with drill-
new wells were increased. ing from traditional vertical rigs were a
An upgrade of a surface steam result of the high dogleg severity associ-
generation unit raised the steam ated with the reservoirs shallow depth
pumping pressure. (200 m to 220 m in total vertical depth).
By implementing counterflow SAGD Among the challenges faced were low
technology, we increased horizontal penetration rates because of insufficient
welllength, reduced operational expens- weight on bit owing to buckling and
es, eliminated adverse working condi- the inadequate weight of the bottom-
Mikhail Chertenkov, SPE, is the deputy chief executive officer of
field development technology at Lukoil-Engineering. His areas of
scientific interest include improvement in the processes for
development of heavy oil fields and new technologies. Chertenkov
holds a degree in geology and prospecting of oil and gas fields
from the Tomsk Polytechnic University in Russia. He was a
program committee cochair at the SPE Russian Petroleum
Technology Conference in Moscow in October.
48
hole assembly and drillstring. Another
issue was the inability to reach target
depth with casing because of the rigs
low weight, friction, and an inability to
push down casing from the surface.
The use of a slant drilling rig resolved
these issues. However, we had to use
slant workover rigs later on.
In oil mining, the horizontal drill-
ing technology has been changed sev-
eral times in Yarega. Before 2011, hor-
izontal well lengths did not exceed
300 m because of technical constraints
and wells were drilled blindly. Start-
ing in 2011, we increased horizontal well
lengths up to 800 m with the application
of new mining drilling systems. In addi-
tion, measurement-while-drilling tech-
nology allowed us to maximize the length
of reservoir contact. As a result, oil pro-
duction rates increased significantly and
operating expensesdecreased.
How can intelligent well technology
increase heavy oil production?
The key factor in successful SAGD proj-
ect implementation is to provide suf-
ficient steam quality supported with
instrumental daily control and reservoir
heating monitoring along the horizontal
welllengths.
The steam dryness factor, pressure,
and temperature are monitored online
from the steam generation facility to the
wellheads on Yarega field. To control res-
ervoir heating along a production wells
length, fiber-optic systems are mounted
behind casing on screens in the horizon-
tal parts of the well. In steam-injection
wells, fiber-optic systems are mounted
on tubing.
Fiber-optic sensors provide reservoir
temperature profile data to allow on-
time decision making for steam cham-
JPT DECEMBER 2015
ber expansion control (by steam pump-
ing rate), mode adjustment for electrical
submersible pumps, maintenance of the
pumping/production ratio to achieve
optimal subcooling, and engineering and
remedial operations based on well integ-
rity monitoring.
Given the harsh environments such
as those in the Caspian region, what
are the challenges when deploying
new technologies?
Lukoil assets include heavy oil reserves at
depths greater than 1.5 km. The compa-
ny is working on issues related to steam
delivery without large heat losses to
suchdepths.
We have also successfully developed
tight-rock carbonate reservoirs at depths
to 4 km. We revised the field develop-
ment approach, rejected vertical well
drilling, and switched to horizontal well
drilling with multistage fracturing. The
JPT DECEMBER 2015
development of the multistage fractur-
ing technology required the use of high-
powered fracturing equipment to gener-
ate higher pumping pressures compared
with those that are commonly used on
Russian oil fields. It also required the use
of weighted fracturing fluids to eliminate
formation damage. These solutions are
used today in our regular operations on
a large scale.
We are getting ready to start drilling
in the Filanovskogo (Filanovsky) field in
the Caspian Sea where we will implement
extended reach drilling technology and a
remotely operated and self-acting inflow
control completion system.
As part of the improvements in res-
ervoir management processes, there is
progress in deploying fiber-optic mon-
itoring systems and inflow indica-
tion chemical tracers that are placed
either under the completion or in
fracturingfluid.
What are the technology trends
anticipated in the next 5 years?
Current oil and gas reserves developed
by Lukoil can be characterized by thin
pays, low permeability and tight reser-
voirs, and oil rims. In these reservoirs,
multilateral wells are required, includ-
ing some with multistage fracturing.
Therefore, we expect more exploration
of these technologies in the next cou-
ple of years. So far, the company has
drilled approximately 100 multilater-
al wells with continual improvement in
thetechnology. JPT
For Further Reading
SPE 171275 Improvement of Drilling
Technology for the Yarega Heavy
Oil Field Development by SAGD
Method With Counter-Producing and
Injecting Wells by D.S. Loparev and
M.V. Chertenkov, Lukoil-Engineering;
G.V.Buslaev, USTU Oil and Gas R&D
Institute; et al.
49
 CONFERENCE REVIEW
Upstream Opportunities in North Africa
Depend on Advanced Technical Knowledge
Abdelghani Henni, JPT Middle East Editor
The SPE North Africa Technical Confer-
ence and Exhibition held in Cairo in Sep-
tember highlighted the upstream sector
with a focus on Egypt and the opportuni-
ties offered in the region, despite its eco-
nomic hardships and geopolitical risks.
Delivering the keynote speech on
behalf of the petroleum minister, Sherif
Ismail, who was appointed as Egypts
prime minister one week before the
event, Sherif Sousa said that North Afri-
ca offers many opportunities in the
upstream sector. Sousa is the first under-
secretary of gas affairs at Egypts Petro-
leum and Mineral Resources Ministry.
There are as many opportunities
today as there ever were, but they are
different and lie in more harsh environ-
ments requiring advanced technologies
and greater investments. A clear exam-
ple is the recent Zohr discovery achieved
by Eni, he said. Zohr is the largest gas
discovery ever made in Egypt and in the
Mediterranean Sea.
The region is also facing rising costs.
Exploration and production [E&P] costs
in different regions are escalating dra-
Ahmed El-Banbi, program chairman
and a professor at Cairo University,
says that the oil price downturn may
not continue for a long time, and the
industry will emerge for the better
and more efficient.
50
matically, putting more pressure on
upstream activities, where existing and
future oil and gas opportunities cannot
be explored without applying state-of-
the-art-technologies, he said.
Innovation is required for tapping the
regions vast resources. We can also
expect further innovations to reduce the
escalating costs of exploration and pro-
duction, unlock additional resources,
and increase supplies, Sousa said.
Ahmed El-Banbi, program chairman
and a professor at Cairo University, said
that the oil price downturn may not con-
tinue for a long time, and the industry
will emerge for the better and more effi-
cient. We have done this before, and
we will do it again. So, get ready for the
industry when it bounces back, he said.
Osama El-Bakly, chairman of Agiba
Petroleum, said that soaring domestic
consumption has led Egyptian General
Petroleum Corp. (EGPC) to speed up its
development plans. He spoke on behalf
of Tarek El Molla, conference chairman
and the chief executive officer (CEO)
ofEGPC.
To achieve this target, we require the
coordination and cooperation between
various E&P companies in the country,
including EGPC, EGAS [Egyptian Natu-
ral Gas], and Ganope [Ganoub El-Wadi
Petroleum], he said.
Among the proposed solutions to
meet the growing local demand, Egypt is
increasing E&P activities and reviewing
agreements and development leases with
foreign partners. We are also developing
unconventional resources, increasing the
use of enhanced oil recovery [EOR] meth-
ods, as well as changing the strategic use
of oil and gas to increase its value, he said.
The widening gap between the demand
and supply of petroleum products in
Egypt also requires increased efficiency
throughout the oil and gassectors.
In terms of drilling, we have pro-
gressed from drilling tens of meters
to many kilometers below the surface,
both vertically and horizontally. The
total number of wells put on produc-
tion during 20142015 is 388, producing
80,800BOPD and 13,400 B/D of conden-
sates, El-Bakly said.
He also referred to the discovery of
the Zohr supergiant gas field. It could
become one of the worlds largest natural
gas discoveries and help meet Egypts gas
needs for decades, he said. It will be a
game changer for Egypt and the Mediter-
ranean in terms of energy stability and
will give a boost forward for more natural
gas discoveries in the area.
Eni reported that available well and
seismic data indicate that the Zohr discov-
ery could hold a potential of 30 Tcf of lean
gas (5.5 billion BOE) in place covering an
area of approximately 100 km2.
The Zohr 1X NFW discovery well was
drilled to a total depth of approximately
13,553 ft (4131 m) and hit 2,067ft (630m)
Osama El-Bakly, chairman of Agiba
Petroleum, says that soaring domestic
consumption has led Egyptian
General Petroleum Corp. to speed
upits development plans.
JPT DECEMBER 2015
 HIGHER STANDARDS
of hydrocarbon column in a carbonate
sequence of Miocene age with excellent
reservoir characteristics (approximately
400 m of net pay). The wells structure
also has a deeper Cretaceous upside that
will be targeted with a dedicated well in
the future.

Small, Medium Firms Needed

The plenary session highlighted the
importance of small- and medium-
size enterprises (SMEs) in driving the
industry in the region to the next level.
Panelists said that the current peri-
od offers opportunities for investment
and innovations for SMEs, even though
governments in the region are remov-
ing subsidies, which help SMEs to tap
theseopportunities.
But governments in the MENA [Mid-
dle East and North Africa] region need
to incentivize SMEs as they are the main
drivers for innovation and for the econ-
omy in general, said Abdul Jaleel Al-

IN CORE ANALYSIS,
Khalifa, CEO of Dragon Oil. Unlike IOCs
[international oil companies] which
come to the region and take concessions,
SMEs focus on marginal fields with low
overhead, but their contribution to job
and wealth creation is huge.
EXPERIENCE
IS EVERYTHING
Al-Khalifa said that major companies
can help local SMEs through talent shar-
ing, technology transfer, and business
partnerships. In return, SMEs should
avoid taking high risks and plan for bet-
ter capital management, he said.
Ali Mira, president and CEO of Sahara 152 SENIOR INDUSTRY
Oil and Gas, said that SMEs play a vital role
in the Egyptian oil industry as they pro- EXPERTS
duce more than 115,000 B/D of Egyptian
oil. Medium companies produce about
91,000 BOPD, while small enterprises
4,084 YEARS OF KNOWLEDGE
produce around 24,000 BOPD, he said.
Mira said that there are 37 SMEs
COMBINED
working in the oil and gas industry in
Egypt, with Khalda Petroleum, which is
an Apache-operated joint venture with
EGPC, Petrobel [Belayim Petroleum], and
Gupco [Gulf of Suez Petroleum] leading
the market. These companies also face
the challenges of a shortage of skilled
labor and lack of capital.
SMEs are very important to the
countrys economy and overcoming the

(Continued on page 96)

www.weatherfordlabs.com
JPT DECEMBER 2015
 MANAGEMENT

Subsea Condition Monitoring: Does Effective

Diagnosis Increase Availability?
Chen Yuru Serene, FMC Technologies, and Leong Pei Chze, Forsys Subsea

The challenges encountered in deep- Subsea condition Data Collection: Read-only

water development have led to the use software to acquire real-time
of increasingly complex subsea sys- monitoring is one of andhistorical knowledge from
tems. Consequently, operators have the beneficial real- thesubsea control system.
become more reliant on subsea mon- Storinghistorical data and
itoring equipment and instrumenta- time diagnostic tools in supporting analysis based on
tion to provide field information for the subsea production historical trends.
understanding production and equip- Analysis: Onshore analysis
ment conditions. Production monitor- surveillance system. server applies statistical analysis,
ing is typically the field operators main signal processing, mathematical
priority, and equipment condition and modeling, and simulations to
performance are sometimes overlooked, Condition Monitoring ascertain system conditions.
resulting in equipment failures and Condition monitoring is a proactive Requires experience-based product
long production downtimes because of maintenance strategy combining soft- knowledge and reliability analysis
unplannedmaintenance. ware and people. Data are used to diag- to target known failure modes and
Equipment failures often occur with- nose changes in the integrity of a sys- performance issues. System may
out warning and may sometimes, when tem such that corrective action may be tuned and updated in order to
caused by environmental factors, be planned in a cost-effective manner continuously improve its online
become inevitable. To determine the to increase system availability. Condi- diagnostic performance.
cause, field operators sift through vast tion monitoring is not a novel technol- Collaboration and Discussion:
amounts of distributed data from the ogy and is currently used in the aero- Estimation of potential impact
subsea controlsystem. nautical and automobile industries. on production (availability) is
The system downtime can be reduced The condition monitoring system takes built into the system based on
and system availability can be increased integrity monitoring beyond tradition- operational and maintenance
by performing effective equipment diag- al key performance indicators by uti- philosophy. With remote
nosis. With the current low-oil-price lizing all available data and informa- surveillance, multiple onshore
environment, subsea operators are tion from the system and looking for and offshore users are able to
looking to maximize returns on invest- trends of equipment degradation prior operate the system on a web-
ment, and condition-based monitor- to equipmentfailure. based graphical user interface for
ing offers the possibility of lowering A condition monitoring system is typi- monitoring and troubleshooting
operational expenses while increasing cally based on the following three-step of the subsea field. To simplify
fieldproduction. monitoring process: monitoring, each component and
associated potential failure mode
is designed with its individual
Chen Yuru Serene is a reliability engineer for subsea engineering services at FMC userinterface.
Technologies, focusing on subsea reliability studies, facilitating the identification of The status of each component is deter-
potential risks, and running reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) analysis mined after the processing and analy-
for subsea production systems. Serene holds a bachelors degree in mechanical sis of the raw data. The integrity of
engineering from Nanyang TechnologicalUniversity. each component also contributes to the
Leong Pei Chze is a life of field engineer at Forsys Subsea, focusing on subsea parentcomponent.
condition monitoring systems. Before this, she was a production performance
services engineer and a controls and data management product design engineer at Subsea Failure Trends
FMC Technologies. Pei Chze holds a bachelors degree in electrical and electronics Based on the field experience of opera-
engineering from Universiti Tenaga Nasional. tors, typical offshore and onshore equip-

52 JPT DECEMBER 2015

 Control System, 70.6% Manifold, 1.9% Control System, 81.16%
Wellhead and Christmas Tree, 27.0% Flowline, 0.4% Christmas Tree, 13.04%
Template, 0.1% Others, 5.80%
All images courtesy of FMC Technologies.

Fig. 1A comparison of failure distribution in a subsea system (left) and focus area of condition monitoring
system(right).

ment failure trends may be obtained Theoretical Model The key differences in modeling a sys-
from the reliability data source, OREDA, A Markov chain is a method to study tem with condition monitoring and one
a database used to collect and exchange the transition from one state to anoth- without are:
reliability data for the improvement of er based on conditional probabilities There is no complete loss in
safety, reliability, maintenance effective- (Fig.3). It is commonly used to describe equipment functionality when
ness, and to enhance industry reputation systems that follow a chain of linked the condition monitoring system
on equipment and plant performance. events, in which what happens next proactively detects a failure.
The database provides subsea equipment depends on the current state of the sys- Mostof the functions of the
performance history for a wide range of tem. The effect of introducing a condi- equipment are still available.
equipment from system to component tion monitoring system on the availabil- Thisisrepresented by the
level. This information can be used to ity of equipment is demonstrated using restoration parameter b from
predict the availability performance of this approach. thepartial failure state to the
systems and facilities.
Data from OREDA24 Databank Version
5000.2.1 up to 11 June 2015 was analyzed
for the number of failures in various sub-
systems, including control system, well-
head, subsea tree, template, manifold,
and flowline. The control system was
identified as the leading contributor of
subsea system failures, followed by the
wellhead and subsea tree. The condition
monitoring system is designed to moni-
tor the subsea conditions with the same
order of focus (Fig.1).
A closer look at control system fail-
ures shows that the subsea control
module (SCM) is the largest contribu-
Control/signal failure, single well shutdown, 58%
tor (33%) to subsystem failures. Fur-
Other, single well shutdown, 6%
ther examination of the critical failure
Internal leakageutility medium, single well shutdown, 6%
modes of the module (Fig. 2) reveals External leakageutility medium, reduced production/injection, 6%
that the failure rate of the control/signal External leakageutility medium, single well shutdown, 6%
(58%) is the largest contributor to sin- Fail to function on demand, reduced production/injection, 6%
gle well shutdown. The ability to moni- Fail to function on demand, no consequence, 6%
tor the condition of the SCM and plan Fail to function on demand, single well shutdown, 6%
ahead for maintenance is, therefore,
crucial in reducing downtime. Fig. 2Failure distribution for subsea control modules based on OREDA.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 53

 working state as represented In this analysis, we define the failure ures. In this analysis, the failure trans-
in theMarkov chain. For the transfer ratio asfollows: fer ratio is assumed to be 0.95, meaning
purpose of this analysis, b=0.80, that the condition monitoring system is
representing that 80% equipment Failure transfer ratio= capable of diagnosing 95% of failures
function is still available when on the equipment. Weibul distribution
condition monitoring system Failure probability from working state is used in this analysis.
detects a potential failure. to partial failure state
The probability of equipment The Value of Condition
failure is distributed such that Failure probability from working state Monitoring
the condition monitoring system to complete failure state Condition monitoring provides real-
will detect the failure before time visibility on the condition of the
total equipment failure happens. =f1/(f1+ f2) system. Partial system failures are also
This transfers the susceptibility readily detected and diagnosed, allow-
of failure to the condition A higher ratio correlates to a greater ing forward planning for maintenance.
monitoringsystem and reduces effectiveness of the condition monitor- Such maintenance is typically more
thelikelihood of equipment failure. ing system to diagnose and detect fail- cost-efficient than performing reactive
maintenance, where the extent of fail-
f 1+ f 2 ure and associated costs are far greater.
The life cycle of equipment can be rep-
b resented by three regions of the bath-
tub curve, characterized by the value
Working Partial Complete (Fig. 4). A particular analysis was per-
R(t )
State
f1 Failure State
f2
Failure State formed for a value of 0.5. This denotes
the installation of the condition moni-
a
toring system in the equipments early
c
Proactive
life. The results indicate: a) Lower prob-
Maintenance d ability of maintenance for equipment
State
with condition monitoring (Fig. 5); and
b) Higher equipment availability with
condition monitoring, up to 18.5%. This
Unplanned trend was found to be true for all regions
m Maintenance
State
of the bathtub curve.

Operational Example
Fig. 3A Markov chain for equipment condition. a is the probability that signs The first full condition monitoring sys-
of failure can be diagnosed correctly given that the equipment is in a partial
failure state; b is the probability of equipment to be working given it is in a
tem by FMC Technologies, Condition
partial failure state; c is the probability that condition monitoring triggered and Performance Monitoring (CPM),
maintenance will be carried out to restore the equipment to a working state; was delivered to an oil and gas field in
d is the probability that a failure can be diagnosed correctly given that the the North Sea. The system consists of
equipment has failed; m is the probability that maintenance will be carried out data collection software and historical
and will restore the equipment to a working state; and R(t) is the probability
that equipment remains working given that it is currently working.
data storing, together with an onshore
analysis server.
The electronic components in the
Wear-out Life,
Early Life, >1
subsea router module are sealed at
<1 atmospheric pressure. An internal pres-
Failure Rate

sure transmitter records the pressure.

Three weeks into the initial tuning of the
CPM system, the system detected a con-
tinuous pressure increase. This prompt-
Useful Life,
=1 ed the operators to investigate further,
and it was later concluded that the mod-
ules internal pressure had been increas-
ing for the past 2 months because of a
Time weakness in the fiber penetrator on the
Fig. 4Each region on this bathtub curve is characterized by the shape subsea router module. The module con-
parameter, value. tinued operating for a further 3 months

54 JPT DECEMBER 2015

 25

20.93%
20
Probability of Maintenance (%)

Reactive maintenance
(without condition monitoring)
15 Proactive maintenance
(with condition monitoring)

Reactive maintenance
(with condition monitoring)
10

5 4.72%

1.24%
0
0 5 10 15 20
Time (years)

Fig. 5The probability of maintenance was found to be higher for equipment without condition monitoring than for
equipment with condition monitoring.

until failure, after which the subsea control system automati-

cally switched to the redundant module.
The early detection allowed the operator to have full vis-
ibility of the modules condition and subsequently prevented
Shale Plays Development
otherwise unforeseeable communication errors. Given early Optimization www.amros.us
warning, the operator was provided sufficient time to concur-
rently plan an intervention campaign while troubleshooting Amros Corporation uses standard
theproblem.
open-hole log data to calculate a
Conclusion production profile that shows where
Subsea condition monitoring is one of the beneficial real-time recoverable oil is located, where to
diagnostic tools in the subsea production surveillance system. frack vertical wells and where to drill
The benefits of the condition monitoring system were studied and frack horizontal wells.
through the application of a Markov chain. The maintenance on
equipment was distributed to two states representing proactive In the Permian Basin Amros
maintenance and reactive maintenance. The condition moni-
toring system was theoretically proven to increase the equip-
Technology reduces the cost of
ments availability, especially if the system is installed during fracking up to 50% while increasing
the equipments early life. Although the analysis was performed well production at least 20% with an
at the equipment level, the resulting trend is the same when average of 900% rate of return.
applied to a system with a high level ofredundancy.
The more effective the condition monitoring systems diag- FRACK LESS PRODUCE MORE
nosis, the higher the chance for it to capture the equipment
degradation prior to failure and increase the equipments avail-
ability. For an efficient condition monitoring system, the type Most Promising Company at
and amount of data received is critical to enable a comprehen-
sive system of fault diagnosis. However, this remains a chal-
RICE Alliance in 2015 twice
lenge as there is limitation on data access and availability from
subseaoperators.JPT

JPT DECEMBER 2015 55

 TECHNOLOGY FOCUS
Reserves/Asset Management
Greg Horton, SPE, Retired, and Barbara Pribyl, SPE, Reserves and Resources Manager, Santos
The oil and gas industry has undergone of their businessat strategic, tactical,
dramatic change in recent times. On one and operational levels, underpinned at
hand, technology has driven an increase all times by sound and unbiased techni-
in availability of supply, primarily from cal and commercial work.
unconventional sources. Concurrently, The suite of papers in this feature
global economic and political influences addresses various aspects of these criti-
have resulted in sustained oversupply of cal business requirements. At the strate-
oil and gas, despite declining demand. gic level, the importance of using a robust
The effect on the industry has been to framework for ranking exploration,
return to operating conditions not seen appraisal, and development projects in
for decades, with sustained low prices order of commercialization maturity, as
and sluggish demand forecast to contin- embodied by the Petroleum Resources
ue at least in the near to medium term. Management System promulgated by
The solution space for oil and gas com- SPE, is discussed in paper SPE 170747.
panies to stay viable during this diffi- At the tactical and operational level, the
cult period is challenging and cannot be importance of systematic application of
reliant on external factors of rapid price standards and guidelines for technical
increase, uplift in demand, or reduction work and of maximizing the benefit by a
in supply. Instead, companies need to truly multidisciplinary approach to deci-
find efficiencies within their capital- and sion making and development of a road
operating-cost base and to examine close- map to show the way forward to opti-
ly and make optimal use of their assets. mize recovery and maximum value is
Business as usual no longer exists, and described in paper SPE 175004. Further-
companies must challenge every aspect more, the value of look-backs and cal-
Greg Horton, SPE, is retired from Santos after 33 years of
reservoir-management responsibilities and maintains an active
role in improving the SPE Petroleum Resources Management
System (PRMS). He holds an honors degree in civil engineering
from Adelaide University. Horton joined Santos as a field petroleum
engineer in 1982. Since then, he has worked in many petroleum,
reservoir, and planning engineering roles and in financial roles.
Horton has managed extensive external audits of Santos reserves
and contingent resources. He was a member of the SPE Oil and Gas Reserves
Committee from 2011 to 2014, is a member of the PRMS Improvements Subcommittee,
and serves on the JPT Editorial Committee.
Barbara Pribyl, SPE, is reserves and resources manager at Santos.
She has more than 20 years of experience as a geologist and in
reserves and resources management based in the Australian oil
and gas, coal exploration, and coal-seam gas industry. Pribyl holds
an honors degree in geology from the University of Wollongong.
Her focus in recent years has been on Australian and international
oil and gas reserves and resources assurance and reporting. Pribyl
has been a member of the SPE Oil and Gas Reserves Committee
since 2014.
56
ibrating performance, to extract value
from lessons learned to be used in devel-
opment of realistic learning curves, is
assessed in paper SPE 172973.
The need for cost and capital efficiency
calls for careful integration of technical
and commercial elements. Many com-
panies will be able to cite examples of
disconnect between these elements, with
resultant destruction of value and loss of
opportunity. Recognition of uncertainty
and sound technical input into commer-
cial and financial models are critical and,
when done correctly, allow effective port-
folio analysis to be conducted. Paper OTC
26061 provides an excellent overview of
the elements of such an analysis.
These papers highlight the critical
importance of application of overarch-
ing strategic frameworks within oper-
ating and service companies as key
enablers to realizing required efficiency
improvements. These frameworks must
include mechanisms to consistently and
objectively assess portfolios of assets, to
identify their strengths and weaknesses,
to provide confidence levels that reflect
the inherent risk and uncertainty that
exist within oil and gas projects, and,
above all, to ensure best use of human
capital and incorporate lessons learned
from past experience. JPT
Recommended additional reading
at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org.
SPE 175527 Validating Analog Production
Type Curves for Resource Plays
by Mark McLane, Rose & Associates, et al.
IPTC 18063 Is Your Trap Filled To Spill?
by Douglas Peacock, Gaffney, Cline &
Associates
IPTC 18128 The Art of Balancing the Cost
and Value for Field Development
by Keng Seng Chan, Petronas, et al.
JPT DECEMBER 2015
Chance of Development:
Definition, Estimation, and Use

C hance of Development (CoD)

iscommonly used as an
input toeconomic assessments
and valuations where it is often
quoted withlittle explanation
of the frameworkused. In such
circumstances,it may be misleading
and overly simplistic to multiply
the project net present value (NPV)
by a single CoD factor to derive a
risked NPV as a proxy for value.
This paper will examine ways in
which CoD can be defined better,
methods for its estimation, and its
appropriateapplication along with
common misuses.
Introduction
The Petroleum Resources Management
System (PRMS) is an international stan-
dard petroleum-reserves-and-resources
classification system based on industry
best practices and is described in de-
tail in the complete paper. The PRMS
encourages the use of subclasses that
provide some qualitative assessment of
CoD. These subclasses include
Development Pending, where
project activities are ongoing to
justify commercial development in
the foreseeable future.
Development Unclarified or On
Hold, where project activities are
on hold or where justification as a
commercial development may be
subject to a significant delay. This
subclass refers to quite different
situations; Unclarified typically
refers to internal decisions,
whereas On Hold is more related
toexternalfactors.
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights
of paper SPE 170747, Chance of Development: What Is It? Can We Estimate It? How
Should We Use It?, by Doug Peacock, SPE, and Tracey Jennings, SPE, Gaffney, Cline
& Associates, prepared for the 2014 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition,
Amsterdam, 2729 October. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
Development Not Viable, where
there are no current plans to acquire
additional data because of limited
production potential.
The PRMS also allows Contingent Re-
sources to be further divided according
to economic status.
Marginal Contingent Resources
are technically feasible projects
that are either currently economic
or projected to be economic
under reasonably forecasted
improvements in commercial
conditions but are not currently
committed for development because
of one or more contingencies.
Sub-Marginal Contingent
Resources are those associated
with discoveries for which
analysisindicates that technically
feasible development projects
would not be economic or
othercontingencies would
not be satisfied under current
or reasonably forecasted
improvements in commercial
conditions. If evaluations
are incomplete, it may also
be possible for economic
status tobeundetermined.
Thus, Marginal Contingent
Resources would typically have
a higher CoD than Sub-Marginal
ContingentResources.
Boundaries
of Contingent Resources
CoD is especially important for Contin-
gent Resources; once a discovery is made,
CoD is equivalent to chance of commerci-
ality. A large range of CoD is possible for
Contingent Resources. When consider-
ing CoD for Contingent Resources, it is
important to understand the boundar-
ies that define this classification. These
boundaries are, first, the discovery test,
which allows Prospective Resources to
be reclassified as Contingent Resources,
and, second, the commerciality criteria
required for Contingent Resources to be
reclassified as Reserves.
For many conventional accumulations,
the discovery test may be quite conclu-
sive, but in other situations (e.g., uncon-
ventional resources or high-cost envi-
ronments), it can be ambiguous. In these
cases, the results of early exploration
may not be sufficient to indicate whether
a discovery has occurred.
A more onerous discovery test may
prevent accumulations from easily be-
coming Contingent Resources, such that
those that do will likely have a higher
CoD. Conversely, if a discovery test is eas-
ier to pass, then large volumes may be-
come Contingent Resources, but these
may be less likely to be matured into Re-
serves quickly and easily. It may also be
possible to limit the extent of a discovery,
such that only part of a potential accumu-
lation is discovered.
Comparison of CoD
With Geological Chance
of Success (GCoS)
A comparison with GCoS is relevant here.
CoD is almost analogous to GCoS in that
it is the chance of maturing a project
from one resources class to the next. The
analogy is not perfect, however, because
Reserves may still have some residual,
but very low, risk of not reaching com-
mercial producing status until they are
actually on production. For GCoS, there
is a generally well-accepted methodolo-
gy for risk assessment that uses standard
petroleum system elements. Risk factors
associated with the key elements such as
Source, Migration, Reservoir, and others

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 57

 are typically combined in order to gener-
ate a GCoS.
A major difference between CoD and
GCoS is that CoD contingencies can be
changed or removed by taking certain ac-
tions. For example, if partner approvals
are not forthcoming, a company might
choose to develop a project under sole
risk; or, if infrastructure was not avail-
able, it could be constructed.
Factors for Consideration
When Estimating CoD
Given that the practice for defining
GCoS is accepted, it is worth considering
whether a similar methodology can be
used for CoD. Instead of petroleum sys-
tem elements, the technical and commer-
cial factors or contingencies that must
be overcome to progress the project and
that may prevent a project from reach-
ing commercial producing status can be
considered. In order to do this, the start-
ing point would likely be to reference the
criteria required for volumes associated
with a project to be classified as Reserves.
In addition to evidence of commercial
producibility, these criteria are stated in
the PRMS as follows (PRMS 2007):
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58
Discovered recoverable volumes
(Contingent Resources) may be consid-
ered commercially producible, and thus
Reserves, if the entity claiming commer-
ciality has demonstrated firm intention
to proceed with development and such
intention is based upon all of the follow-
ing criteria (complete-paper-author em-
phasis added):
Evidence to support a reasonable
timetable for development
A reasonable assessment of
the future economics of such
development projects meeting
defined investment and operating
criteria
A reasonable expectation that
there will be a market for all or at
least the expected sales quantities
of production required to justify
development
Evidence that the necessary
production and transportation
facilities are available or can be
made available
Evidence that legal, contractual,
environmental, and other social
and economic concerns will allow
for the actual implementation
of the recovery project being
evaluated.
Such contingencies could be used to-
gether to provide a qualitative estimate of
the CoD. Typical factors considered (oth-
ers are provided in the complete paper)
are as follows:
Government approval
Company/partner internal sanction
Infrastructure risk
Market risk (typically a bigger issue
for gas developments than for oil)
Technology requirements (use
of new, or yet to be proved,
technology)
Timeframe
The PRMS uses terminology such as
reasonable timeframe and significant
delay in relation to Reserves but not
for Contingent Resources. For Reserves,
a benchmark of 5 years to attain/recom-
mence commercial production is sug-
gested, but this will depend on specific
circumstances and may be longer.
It seems reasonable that there should
be a timeframe for CoD, and that a CoD
estimate should relate to this timeframe.
A project may be quite immature, perhaps
a recent discovery, but with positive char-
acteristics, such that it is likely to pro-
ceed to development with no significant
delay. Even a large, complex offshore
project with no significant delay would
be expected to proceed from discovery
to commercial producing status within
1015 years. Delays would be indicative
of contingencies, which would therefore
reduce the CoD. Would 5 years then be
appropriate? This would be consistent
with the recommended 5-year period for
Reserves and, when combined, would
allow up to 10 years from discovery until
commercial producing status.
However, consider a project with no
contingencies other than the fact that
it is not planned for development for,
say, 78 years. Would this project have a
very low or even zero CoD purely on the
basis of its timing? In such a case, would
it be reasonable to use the same discre-
tion as used for Reserves? To avoid such
issues, it may be useful to consider a
10-yeartimeframe.
Another element that requires further
definition when estimating the chance
of commerciality is a development plan.
As a project-based system, the PRMS en-
courages definition of a project at all
stages, although it is recognized that less-
mature projects will have less-well-
defined, more-conceptual develop-
mentplans.
CoD for Prospective Resources
Prospective Resources have both a
chance of discovery and a chance of de-
velopment. Therefore, even if a discovery
is made, it may not be commercially de-
veloped. One method commonly used is
to estimate an economic threshold that
determines a minimum economic field
size. An often-used guideline is that any-
thing above the threshold will be devel-
oped; anything below will not. Such early
assessments are often made using a con-
ceptual development plan, perhaps based
on nearby commercial developments, if
available. For a discovered accumulation
below the threshold, it may be possible
to tailor a more-efficient development
plan, develop as part of a cluster, use
new technology, or find some other so-
lution to allow commercial development
to occur. Even if the discovery volume
surpasses the economic threshold, there
may be other contingencies that prevent
JPT DECEMBER 2015
commercial development. Therefore,
the same criteria discussed previously
for Contingent Resources should also be
considered for Prospective Resources.
Use and Misuse
of CoD in Valuations
In the context of the PRMS, CoD is sim-
ply a technical estimate (similar to that
of GCoS) that represents the chance of
the volumes associated with a specific
development project becoming Reserves.
However, CoD is often used for other pur-
poses, particularly for valuations. A com-
mon and often inappropriate assump-
tion is to use CoD as a risk factor that
can be multiplied by an NPV to produce a
value for an asset. But is a CoD equiva-
lent to such a risk factor?
Where an economic evaluation is re-
quired, an appropriate approach is to
generate a range of scenarios that takes
into account different development sce-
narios and technical uncertainties, but
also considers sensitivities to timing and
Virginia Tech, College of Engineering
Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering
Assistant or Associate Professor
Geoenergy Engineering
This position is under the Virginia Tech (US) and the University of Nottingham (UK)
joint initiative, a Best with Best alliance, designed to enable high-impact research to
address the Global Energy Trilemma grand challenge (security of supply, affordability,
and sustainability). This challenge encompasses (i) enhanced oil and gas recovery; (ii) safe,
permanent and economic CO2 sequestration and utilization; (iii) effective production of
alternative hydrocarbons (e.g. shale gas, coal bed methane) with minimal environmental
impact; and (iv) a sound basis for management & protection of water resources. While there
are substantial individual efforts within aspects of these areas in the global academic and
research communities, this partnership led by VCCER (Virginia Tech) and GERC (University
of Nottingham) is novel due to its overarching, multi-scale and heuristic approach towards
impacts in energy production and CO2 management.
 Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research: VCCER is a leading group in the US
HVWDEOLVKHGE\WKH&RPPRQZHDOWKRI 9LUJLQLDDQGDIOLDWHGZLWKWKH'HSDUWPHQWRI 
Mining and Minerals Engineering, engaging in both academic and industry-led research and
with a portfolio in excess of $30m. VCCER operates and conducts research on a number
of large-scale industrial test sites including shale gas, coal bed methane, and CO2 storage.
 GeoEnergy Research Centre: GERC is a pioneering joint venture co-established by the
University of Nottingham (UoN) and the British Geological Survey (BGS). It is supported by a
3m strategic investment from both institutes and has a research focus on the multi-disciplinary
theme Rock-Fluid Interactions. Both institutes are conveniently located in Nottingham;
Engineering is based at the University Park campus and BGS at the Keyworth campus.
VCCER and GERC have combined capabilities in: (i) site monitoring (geophysics, remote
costs. This approach can be integrat- VHQVLQJ URFNXLG VDPSOLQJ LL XLG DQG URFN DQDO\VLV PLQHUDORJ\ SHWURJUDSK\
DGYDQFHG ' LPDJLQJ QRYHO JDV VRUSWLRQ DQDO\VLV DFFHOHUDWHG JHRFKHPLFDO SURFHVVLQJ
ed with the Contingent Resources vol-
ume estimates such that representative
scenarios are selected to represent low,
best, and high estimates. Although CoD
estimates may be used for valuation pur-
poses, within the PRMS at least, CoD is
the chance of volumes associated with a
particular development project reaching
commercial producing status. Similarly,
the PRMS is used to estimate volumes,
not values.
Is it appropriate to have different CoD
values associated with low, best, and
high estimates? In a purely PRMS sense,
it should not be possible to have dif-
ferent CoD estimates for low, best, and
high estimates. However, there may be
situations in which development plans
are flexible and additional wells may
be drilled as required as part of normal
fieldoperations. JPT
DQG LLL PXOWLVFDOH PRGHOOLQJ PXOWLSKDVH XLG RZ IURP SRUH VFDOH reservoir scale).
,QIXOOOLQJWKHREMHFWLYHVRI WKLVLQQRYDWLYHSURJUDPWZRIDFXOW\SRVLWLRQVDUHSODQQHG
one based at Virginia Tech and the other at the University of Nottingham (see posting at
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/jobs/currentvacancies/ref/ENG306215).
The Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering and the VCCER at
Virginia Tech invite applications for a tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant
RU$VVRFLDWH3URIHVVRUOHYHOZLWKUDQNGHWHUPLQHGE\DSSOLFDQWTXDOLFDWLRQV7KH
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an internationally recognized and externally funded research program in the broad
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natural gas engineering, chemical engineering, mining engineering, geosciences
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be minimized to allow the successful applicant to focus on securing new research funding,
submitting high quality publications, and leading US-UK collaborative activities between
9&&(5 DQG *(5& 2QFH HVWDEOLVKHG WKH VXFFHVVIXO FDQGLGDWH ZLOO PDNH D VLJQLFDQW
FRQWULEXWLRQ WR WKH 'HSDUWPHQW YLD WHDFKLQJ DQG DGPLQLVWUDWLYH PDQDJHPHQW DQGRU
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programs in North America with 10 full-time faculty members, +200 undergraduate
VWXGHQWVDQGJUDGXDWHVWXGHQWV7KH'HSDUWPHQWLVKRXVHGZLWKLQDQDWLRQDOO\UDQNHG
College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech, the land-grant University of the
Commonwealth, is located in Blacksburg, Virginia, and has a total enrollment of +30,000
with +7,000 enrolled in the College of Engineering.
Candidates who wish to be considered for these positions should apply online at www.jobs.
vt.edu to posting number TR0150149. The review of applications will begin on January 18,
ZLWKWKHLQWHQWWRKDYHWKHSRVLWLRQOOHGEHIRUH$XJXVW,QTXLULHVVKRXOGEH
Reference GLUHFWHGWR'U0LFKDHO.DUPLV6HDUFK&RPPLWWHH&KDLUPNDUPLV#YWHGX
Petroleum Resources Management System. Virginia Tech is committed to the principle of diversity and, in that spirit, seeks a broad
2007. Prepared by the Oil and Gas Reserves spectrum of candidates including women, minorities and people with disabilities.
Committee of the Society of Petroleum 9LUJLQLD 7HFK LV D UHFLSLHQW RI  D 1DWLRQDO 6FLHQFH )RXQGDWLRQ $'9$1&( ,QVWLWXWLRQDO
Transformation Award to increase the participation of women in academic science and
Engineers; reviewed and jointly sponsored engineering careers.
by the World Petroleum Council, the
American Association of Petroleum
Geologists; and the Society of Petroleum
Evaluation Engineers. Richardson, Texas,
USA: Society of Petroleum Engineers.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 59

 Aligning Diverse Portfolios
and Execution for Capital Efficiency

A ligning a diverse portfolio with

an organizations execution
capabilities and capacity is imperative
3.0

2.0

in achieving capital efficiency and 1.0

meeting shareholder expectations.
Constructing a portfolio that provides 0.0
both cash flow and long-term growth is a 1.0
challenge. There should also be a direct Uncoventional Oil and Gas
connection of the organizations strategy 2.0 Deep Water ad Ultradeep Water
with its investment proposition. Should Oil Sands
3.0
companies mitigate risk by diversification CSG LNG
across countries, asset types, or play 4.0 Floating LNG
types? Or, alternatively, should they be a Integrated LNG
5.0
focused pure-play organization, leaving
the investment diversification to the Fig. 1Typical net-cash-flow profiles for various plays.
investorsthemselves?
Portfolio Composition tradeep water and the oil sands are char-
Industry Trends Significantly different net-cash-flow pro- acterized by high upfront investments and
As complicated as the oil and gas business files (Fig. 1) apply to different oil plays much longer times required to generate
may seem at times, at its core it is quite such as deep water and ultradeep water, a positive net cash flow. In NPV metrics,
simple. It begins by acquiring prospective unconventional, oil sands, and gas plays these plays can add substantive growth.
acreage and exploring to find resources. To such as those requiring integrated lique- The differentiation between deep water
realize the value, produced oil and gas then fied natural gas (LNG), floating LNG, or and oil sands is that the deepwater cash
has to be connected to the markets. But the emerging coal-seam-gas (CSG) con- generation is strong in the early produc-
connecting the three links of this process version to LNG. These differences make tion phase but drops off quickly, whereas
(Resource/Develop/Market) alone is insuf- construction of a portfolio mix, and ar- the oil sands generate steady long-term
ficient. There are external factors, such as riving at its risk weighting, a challenge. cash flows. Gas-play characteristics are
interacting with host governments, com- Onshore unconventional oil and gas similar to those of deepwater oil and oil
munities, regulators, or public policy, that plays are characterized by less upfront in- sands because they require significant up-
must be satisfied. It is only when these fac- vestment (compared with deepwater) with front investment. Where they differ is that
tors are combined appropriately, and their rapid cash-flow generation but continu- the threshold volumes for economic inte-
impacts understood, that value can be re- ous capital investment. When consider- grated gas and export projects increase the
alized. All these aspects must be consid- ing internal-rate-of-return metrics, pro- scale of these projects, with even more up-
ered in constructing an oil and gas portfo- ducing a single onshore well is promising, front capital and longer project schedules.
lio. From a historical perspective, the gaps but to achieve a material growth, using a
that exist between finding the resource, net-present-value (NPV) metric, requires Deepwater and
developing it, and delivering it to the mar- a continuous capital investment with mas- UltradeepwaterPlays
ket for consumers havewidened. sive repeatability. The deep water and ul- The complexity related to developing
deepwater resources is often greater than
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of that associated with conventional on-
shore or shallow-water resources, driv-
paper OTC 26061, Aligning Diverse Portfolio and Execution for Capital Efficiency, by
en by the need for technology to achieve
Martijn Dekker, Shell; Paul McNutt, ConocoPhillips; Greg Roder, Woodside Energy;
the required high threshold volumes for
Stuart Wheaton, Tullow Oil, and Sandeep Khurana, Granherne, prepared for the an economic development. A companys
2015 Offshore Technology Conference, Houston, 47 May. The paper has not been capabilities, expertise, and financial re-
peer reviewed. sources are also a critical input in assess-
ing the strategy to develop a discovered
Copyright 2015 Offshore Technology Conference. Reproduced by permission. resource: These dictate the required pace

The complete paper is available for purchase at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org.

60 JPT DECEMBER 2015

to return cash flow and define the com-
plexity of a project in the context of the
companys capabilities. Schedule drivers
and project complexity are the most im-
portant dimensions in selecting an appro-
priate field-development strategy. Field-
development strategy in this context
refers to the choices around reservoir-
depletion management, project phasing,
and approaches to newtechnology.
The most-common development strat-
egies, however, are the standardized de-
velopment approach and the phased de-
velopment approach. These strategies
provide oil companies the greatest flexi-
bility to manage capital efficiency and risk
while ensuring that the cycle time is short
enough to provide for competitive re-
turns. The development-strategy frame-
work can be taken as a project-centric
lens, with the field-development strategy
dictated solely by the field properties and
location. However, given that the project
complexity and schedule drivers are to a
large extent relative to a companys ca-
pabilities and financial resources, select-
ing the appropriate development strat-
egy can actually be used by a company as
a tool to make it capital-efficient in deep-
water plays. Moreover, it is essential that
stakeholder engagement commence at
the onset of a project, especially when new
governments and regulators are involved.
Unconventional
Oil and GasPlays
To keep the competitive edge in uncon-
ventional oil plays, one needs to improve
drilling and fracturing efficiency. Efficien-
cy can be improved through supply-chain
management, autonomous rigs, multilat-
erals, well spacing, and longer horizontals
with more stages. The investment scale
forces a shift from one-well economics
to a large-scale-investment-opportunity
mindset similar to that in offshore de-
velopments. One must constantly reduce
the footprint on drilling and production
sites and improve efficient use of water
resources, such as recycling flowback and
produced water. Innovative solutions for
handling gas may be evaluated in select
cases such as investing in the conver-
sion of gas into compressed natural gas
(CNG) and small-scale LNG and using it
as a fuel for drilling and fracturing opera-
tions. This requires the creation of part-
nerships with communities and the devel-
JPT DECEMBER 2015
opment of regulations. As these issues are
resolved, the experience is used to expand
into internationallocations.
Unconventional plays are manpower-
intensive because they involve interact-
ing with numerous landowners, drilling,
and fracturing, and at the same time con-
stantly reducing environmental footprint
and making the operation as unobtrusive
as possible to the surroundings. While
the rewards are strong for those that de-
liver, skills for developing unconvention-
al plays are unique and many companies
still struggle to align the process and peo-
ple to achieve capital efficiency.
Oil-Sands Plays
Oil-sands plays can be described as of-
fering huge resource with little to low
decline rate. However, they are capital-
intensive and have high operating costs.
The challenges that come with oil sands
include capital management, margin
management, environmental risks, and
time scale.
The first of these challenges is cost man-
agement. In every aspect of a supply chain
that ranges from rigs to people, the Fort
McMurray Effect (when industry activ-
ity exceeds the ability of the area to sup-
port it and local inflation sets in) is dom-
inant. Capital escalation over the course
of a 4-year project typically exceeds 20%
(given yearly escalation of 5% or more),
well over background inflation. Success-
ful companies recognize the challenges
and collaborate with contractors to pro-
vide steady work that does not exceed the
industry capacity. But the challenges do
not end with first oil. The margin must be
managed as well. It can be eroded by high
operating costs or low netback pricing.
Canadian oil-sands projects face trans-
portation constraints, and new projects
are no more economical than when oil was
at USD 30/bbl. Environmental risks play a
role as well. One operator is attempting
to shorten higher-cost routes (such as rail
and shipping) from Canadian oil sands
to the US Gulf Coast refining complex-
es. That project has faced environmental
opposition rooted in misunderstanding
of fossil-fuels development. A competing
project to move the crude east through
Canada and on to India may eventually
solve the problem, but at a cost.
Finally, the time scale for a return on
investment on an oil-sands play is lon-
ger than that for typical unconvention-
al plays or even for deepwater and ul-
tradeepwater plays.
Gas Plays
For domestic sales, gas is constrained to
markets available within pipeline reach.
If a pipeline goes beyond a countrys
border, there may be protracted de-
bates over tariffs, fees, and usage rights.
Given massive volumes, commercializa-
tion of gas can be achieved by convert-
ing gas into liquids for export, with LNG
being the most common solution. This
also opens up new marketsbeyond
the domestic marketsthrough LNG
export because shipping transport de-
livers the key element of destination
(market) flexibility.
The gas value chain requires confi-
dence in gas supply, where exploration
expertise and reservoir-depletion exper-
tise play a major role. When it comes
to securing the market demand, a long-
term contract at the right price requires
commercial acumen and dealing with the
government and financing entities. Con-
necting gas resources to market with so-
lutions that provide robust flow assur-
ance is where major capital is spent.
As for deepwater gas resources, com-
bining the technology of LNG facilities
onshore, floating systems, and subsea
fields into floating LNG provides a solu-
tion. The floating-LNG solutions, how-
ever, must also consider how the gov-
ernment will benefit from an offshore
development where the gas resource will
not come onshore. A similar challenge
exists in unconventional gas, convincing
the government to export excess uncon-
ventional gas in North America and ulti-
mately light crude oil that cannot easily
be refined in Gulf Coast refineries.
Other sources of unconventional gas
such as CSG (also referred to as coalbed
methane) have the potential to supply a
significant portion of the market, either
through domestic gas supply or through
LNG exports. CSG wells are less productive
compared with conventional gas wells,
with hundreds of wells required to sup-
port initial LNG production. Once up and
running, CSG production output can al-
most equal that of a conventional gas proj-
ect, but it then requires continuouscapital
investment through the drilling of addi-
tional wells to maintain production. JPT
61
 Applying Lessons Learned To Minimize
Overall Investment in Unconventional Plays

Barnett Shale
T he development of unconventional
resources in North America
was aided by the readily available
Retrospective Assessment
The retrospective assessment for the Bar-
ly the water resource has been contrib-
uting to gas production. When plotted
on an annual basis rather than a cumu-
infrastructure, water resources, nett was simulated for five specified cases lative basis, it becomes apparent that,
expertise, and a general understanding by use of the parameters summarized in from approximately 1985 to 1998, water
of potential sweet spots caused by Table 1 and the corresponding cost pa- effectiveness was higher than the typi-
numerous well penetrations. Even with rameters summarized in Table 4 of the cal 0.3 to 1 Mscf/gal, which corresponds
these favorable conditions, an estimated complete paper. This cost model was used to the time period when conventional
40% of unconventional wells are to represent the average cost throughout crosslinked-polymer fluids were com-
uneconomical. This paper provides a the development. Hence, this retrospec- monly used in the early wells. The water
retrospective assessment of the Barnett tive assessment does not account for the effectiveness is lower than average from
and Eagle Ford Shale plays to highlight actual variability in cost from year to year. 2000 to 2008, which is consistent with
lessons learned and the associated value the high-volume slickwater treatments
of those learnings. Barnett Shale Base Case. The over- that were common during that time pe-
all financial investment amounts to riod and with the transition to more frac-
Introduction USD 64 billion for well capital expendi- turing treatment stages per well as the
Although horizontal drilling and multi- ture (CAPEX) for the more than 21,500 industry moved along the learning curve.
stage fracturing (MSF) have changed the wells drilled from 1981 through 2013. The Wells became more cost-efficient at
economic viability of unconventional re- simulated well cost averages USD 1.5 mil- achieving reservoir contact over time with
sources significantly, such drilling has lion for vertical wells and USD 3.8 mil- increasing lateral length and stage count,
also encountered a wide range of produc- lion for horizontal wells with 10 fractur- but the usage of resources such as water
tion variability. This nonideal produc- ing stages. The per-stage cost (hydraulic and proppant became less effective over
tion performance further leads to con- fracturing plus fracturing water and per- time. This decrease in resource effective-
sumption of local resources such as water forating) represents more than 40% of ness is consistent with the 40% of clusters
and proppant that are used in hydraulic- the financial investment over the history that are not contributing to production
fracturing treatments. The poor econom- of the development (58% from well con- and the 40% of wells that are not econom-
ic performance of a high percentage of struction including rigs and less than 1% ical from the MSF brute-force approach,
wells is the result of spatial variability in from measurements in the base-case de- with lateral-landing challenges, and with
reservoir characteristics such as hydro- velopment), with the per-stage costs rep- changes in reservoir quality as operators
carbon in place, gas/oil ratio (GOR), and resenting 50% of the well CAPEX when moved out of the core areas over time.
reservoir pressure; lateral heterogeneity using higher stage counts per well start-
along the wellbores; limited accuracy of ing in 2009. Barnett Shale Retrospective Cases. The
well placement; and variability in drilling, The effectiveness of water usage is impact of developing the Barnett with
completion, and stimulationpractices. illustrated by the historical volume of the efficiency and effectiveness lessons
The development of best practices and water used compared with the cumula- learned was simulated using the actual
the learning curves associated with the tive gas production. When compared on a number of horizontal wells drilled start-
Barnett and Eagle Ford Shale plays are cumulative basis, the results suggest that ing from 2000 (representing the first
detailed in the complete paper, as are the water usage and gas production show day of production for the retrospective
the rationale and methodology for retro- a consistent trend. The higher the water- cases). Using this well-count investment,
spective assessments of both plays. effectiveness value, the more effective- the production profiles for the five cases
were established. It is obvious that im-
plementing horizontal drilling and MSF
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights
from Day 1 would have a profound impact
of paper SPE 172973, USD 40 Billion Learning Curve: Leveraging Lessons Learned on the time to produce 15 Tcf, reducing
To Minimize the Overall Investment in Unconventional Plays, by C.N. Fredd, SPE, from the actual 32 years to approximately
J.L. Daniels, SPE, and J.D. Baihly, SPE, Schlumberger, prepared for the 2015 SPE 12 years with MSF Efficiency case.
Middle East Unconventional Resources Conference and Exhibition, Muscat, Oman, The effect of technology and integra-
2628 January. The paper has not been peer reviewed. tion is just as valuable as the innovation

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

62 JPT DECEMBER 2015

 Base Case Integration + Technology + Technology +
(Actual) Efficiency Efficiency Efficiency Integration + Efficiency
Well Design Vertical + Horizontal (Actual) Horizontal Horizontal Horizontal Horizontal
Well Count Actual Since 1981 Horizontal Horizontal Horizontal Horizontal
(Actual From 2000) (Actual From 2000) (Actual From 2000) (Actual From 2000)
Stages per Well 1 to 10 (Actual) 10 10 10 10
Fraction of Clusters 0.64 0.64 0.82 0.64 0.82
Contributing
Average Water Volume 200 to 1,000 (Actual) 400 to 1,300 (Actual) 400 to 1,300 (Actual) 500 500
per Stage (1,000 gal)
Average Proppant Mass 0.2 to 0.9 (Actual) 0.2 to 0.6 (Actual) 0.2 to 0.6 (Actual) 0.25 0.25
per Stage (MM lbm/gal)
Table 1Simulation parameters for the Barnett Shale retrospective assessment cases.

of horizontal drilling and MSF, both pro-
viding the opportunity to reduce the well-
count investment by more than 5,000
wells while achieving the same produc-
tion target. The reduction in the number
of wells drilled to achieve 15 Tcf obviously
has an enormous economic impact. The
retrospective assessment (detailed in the
complete paper) indicates that more than
USD 23 billion in overall well CAPEX sav-
ings could be realized if the Technology
plus Integration plus MSF Efficiency case
were implemented from the first day of
production in the field.
Implementing the efficiencies of hori-
zontal drilling and MSF clearly reduced
the investment in the number of wells
drilled and well CAPEX. The simulation
cases demonstrate that additional im-
provements in investment efficiency
are achieved by applying the Technolo-
gy plus Integration plus MSF Efficiency
case. Only through the technology and
integration strategies was an improve-
ment in the resource usage achieved be-
cause of an increase in the effective-
ness of the completion and stimulation
designs. Given all the lessons learned
over the past 30 years, this retrospec-
tive assessment indicates that the Bar-
nett Shale could have delivered higher
production or could have been devel-
oped with 11,700 fewer wells drilled (a
greater than 50% reduction), could have
saved 20 billion gal of water (a greater
than 25% reduction) and 21 billion lbm
of proppant (a greater than 45% re-
duction), and could have reduced well
CAPEX investment by USD 23 billion
(more than 35% saved) while still deliv-
ering the same 15 Tcf of gas production
if initially exploited by applying the key
lessons learned. In the Barnett Shale,
USD 23 billion is the financial value of
the 30-year learning curve.
Eagle Ford Shale
Retrospective Assessment
Eagle Ford Shale Base Case. The over-
all financial investment amounts to more
than USD 70 billion for well CAPEX for the
almost 13,000 horizontal wells, 300,000
fracturing stages, 72 billion gal of water,
and 69 billion lbm of proppant to deliver
1 billion bbl of oil from 2005 through mid-
2014. Because of the higher number of
fracturing treatment stages per well in the
Eagle Ford, the per-stage cost represents
approximately 58% of the financial in-
vestment over the history of the develop-
ment compared with approximately 40%
in the Barnett base case.
It is clear that the Eagle Ford took sig-
nificantly less time to ramp up in activity
when compared with the Barnett. This was
because of the application of many of the
lessons learned from developing the Bar-
nett and other shale plays. An economic
well design was reached fairly quickly in
the learning curve, and the number of wells
drilled increased from fewer than 100 to
more than 1,000 per annum over 2 years.
Eagle Ford Shale Retrospective Cases.
Because the Eagle Ford already leveraged
the innovation of horizontal drilling and
MSF from the start of the development,
there is a relatively minor change in oil
production between the base case and the
MSF Efficiency case. The results also dem-
onstrate that Technology and Integration
both provide additional opportunity to in-
crease oil production or reduce the invest-
ment required to achieve a given produc-
tion target. For increased oil production
per unit investment, the Technology plus
Integration plus MSF Efficiency case has
the potential to provide a 70% increase
relative to the base case. The application
of MSF Efficiency approaches from Day 1
could have saved 600 wells, whereas Tech-
nology plus Integration provides the op-
portunity to reduce the well-count invest-
ment by an additional 3,500 wells. Hence,
even with the application of the MSF Effi-
ciency practices from other plays, there is
significant additional opportunity to re-
duce the overall investment with the ap-
plication of Technology plus Integration.
Given all the lessons learned over the
past 9 years (moving beyond the MSF Ef-
ficiency to include Technology plus In-
tegration), this retrospective assessment
indicates that the Eagle Ford could have
delivered higher production or could have
been developed with more than 4,000
fewer wells (a greater than 35% reduc-
tion), could have saved almost 20 billion
gal of water (a greater than 25% reduc-
tion), and 40 billion lbm of proppant (a
greater than 60% reduction), and could
have reduced well CAPEX investment by
USD 18 billion (greater than 20% saved)
while still delivering the same 1 billion bbl
of oil production if initially exploited by
applying the key lessons learned. In the
Eagle Ford oil window, USD 18 billion is
the financial value of the learning curve.
Implications for New
Unconventional Plays
When taken together, these retrospective
assessments demonstrate that the value of
the learning curve is more than USD40bil-
lion for the Barnett (gas) and Eagle Ford
(oil window). This value represents the ef-
fect of Technology plus Integration plus
MSF Efficiency on the required investment
per unit production. The combined reduc-
tion in investment for the same cumula-
tive production is more than 16,000 wells,
40billion gal of water, and 60 billionlbm
of proppant. Alternatively, Technology
plus Integration plus MSF Efficiency can
increase the production per unit invest-
ment by more than 70%. JPT

64 JPT DECEMBER 2015

 CREATING VALUE ALONG THE
PROCESSING JOURNEY.

In the Hydrocarbon Journey, complex production processes often require a complex series of steps to
remove and treat the oil, gas, water, and solids that are extracted from the reservoir. These processes
require technology, experience and innovation.

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in the industry. In addition, our research centers enable us to create real-world processing scenarios so
we can find answers to even the toughest challenges.

Visit c-a-m.com and take the journey with us.

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INVENTING. COLLABORATING. LEADING.

 A Technical-Limits Approach
Applied To Maximizing Gasfield Recovery

System Concept
M aximizing recovery of
hydrocarbons from oil and gas
fields represents responsible asset
The system is used to evaluate the life-
of-field recovery potential of oil and gas
rameters (described in detail in the com-
plete paper) used to frame the recovery
factor in each.
management and is extremely valuable to fields, and the steps required to achieve
both the operator and the host country. this potential, on the basis of the follow- Concept Application
Successful pursuit of this goal involves ing key factors: The current process consists of five
a complex combination of technical, Depth of technical knowledge across keysteps:
commercial, organizational, and human multiple functions 1. Prime
factors. This paper describes recent Innovation, creativity, and 2. Establishing baseline
progress in developing a proprietary awareness of latest technologies 3. Capture
recovery-factor-evaluationprocess. Understanding field specificity, so 4. Rank
that identified opportunities are 5. Report
Introduction properly applicable to the field These steps are carried out over two
In 2002, a root-cause analysis was car- under review workshop sessions with the field teams
ried out on the basis of both external- and are applied to both oil and gas fields.
ly published and internally held data to The Efficiency-Factor Framework. The
identify key success factors for increas- systems efficiency-factor framework Session 1. Prime. This step starts with
ing recovery factor in both gas and oil represents the overall recovery factor up-to-date information about current
fields. This root-cause analysis led to the for the oil field as a product of four com- field understanding, dynamic perfor-
development of a robust and systemat- ponent efficiency factors: mance, and possible future activities
ic approach to identify and describe op- 1. Pore-scale displacement (micro- needing to be collated.
portunities called the Reservoir Techni- scopic efficiency of the recovery process) Establishing Baseline. Before think-
cal Limits (RTL) system. Since its first 2. Drainage (connectedness to a ing of ways to improve recovery, the team
application, this process has provided producer) needs to calibrate their forecast of what
a systematic framework to identify new 3. Sweep (movement of oil into pro- the current development scope will re-
recovery-improving activities across a ducers within the drained volume) cover to adequately define the founda-
portfolio of fields, generate clear owner- 4. Cutoffs (losses related to end of field tions for identifying new opportunities.
ship of the activities by field teams and life or access) The systems conceptual framework is
individuals, and identify technology re- Each efficiency factor is given as a frac- used to split the overall recovery into the
quirements (existing or new) to prog- tion between zero and unity and used as different component efficiency factors
ress the opportunities. This process has a multiplier in the recovery calculation. to achieve a good understanding of the
proved highly effective in identifying and For gas reservoirs, the same approach base case. This involves a consensus on
evaluating the practical recovery poten- was adopted to identify the key compo- what the field has delivered to date and
tial within these fields. nent efficiency factors and operating pa- how, as well as what will have been de-
The process hinges on breaking the rameters influencing recovery. There are livered by the end of the current devel-
overall recovery factor into separate- obvious differences between oil fields, opment plan on the basis of previously
component efficiency factors so that tar- volumetric gas fields, and aquifer-drive committed activities. Available field data
geted recovery-enhancing methods can gas reservoirs, with these subsequently should be used to calibrate individual-
be evaluated. reflected in the efficiency factors and pa- component efficiency factors. Field
knowledge and understanding provided
by the field team are then used to evalu-
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of
ate the contribution of each of these effi-
paper SPE 175004, The Reservoir-Technical-Limits Approach Applied To Maximizing
ciency factors to the base recovery factor.
Recovery From Volumetric and Aquifer-Drive Gas Fields, by Abdelmadjid Alane, Once characterized, the base-case re-
Peter J. Lumsden, P. Craig Smalley, Richard Hallam, Peter A. Salino, SPE, Steven covery factor is benchmarked against a
J. Wells, and Tim J. Primmer, BP, prepared for the 2015 SPE Annual Technical screened set of analogs. This identifies
Conference and Exhibition, Houston, 2830 September. The paper has not been whether the recovery factor is high, nor-
peerreviewed. mal, or low compared with analog fields,

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

66 JPT DECEMBER 2015

giving an idea of the likely potential for
recovery-factor improvement.
Capture. This step is based on a struc-
tured conversation aimed at identify-
ing the various activities that may be
employed to push each efficiency fac-
tor toward its maximum potential. With
the systems conceptual framework, the
participants generate a list of potential
new opportunities. Opportunities are de-
fined as activities with the potential to
increase the recovery factor beyond what
is achievable in the current development
plan. Opportunities for incrementally in-
creasing the recovery are explored, re-
lating each to a specific efficiency factor.
This marks the end of Session 1 of the
review. The interval between the two ses-
sions is used as working time, typically
23 weeks, to evaluate the different op-
portunities in more detail ahead of Ses-
sion 2.
Session 2. Rank. Each of the opportuni-
ties identified in Session 1 is described in
a consistent manner to include the op-
portunity name, activity involved, time
scale, which efficiency factor is being
modified, incremental resource like-
ly to be added, estimates of cost, key
risks, actions needed to begin opportu-
nity progression, technology challeng-
es, and current status of progress. For
each opportunity, the key risks to deliv-
ery are identified and the associated risk-
management activities are highlighted.
The identified opportunities are dis-
cussed and ranked on the basis of criteria
of feasibility, risk, timing, viability, and
technology. As a result, each opportunity is
assigned to one of the following categories:
Options: opportunities that are
well-defined, are viable, carry a low
risk, and can be implemented within
the short term (less than 1 year)
if selected for progression on the
basis of subsequent technical and
commercial analysis.
Possibilities: opportunities that
carry a higher risk, are potentially
economic with existing technology
or with incremental technology
development, and are split
according to likely time scale as
medium-term (i.e., less than 5 years)
or long-term (more than 5 years).
Barrier Opportunities:
opportunities with a technical,
JPT DECEMBER 2015
Virginia Tech, College of Engineering
Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering
Department Head
The Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering at Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University) seeks applications from motivated and visionary leaders for
the leadership position of Department Head. The primary responsibility of the Department
Head is the administration of the departments programs, faculty, staff and students. This
HQWDLOVFRRUGLQDWLRQRI GLIIHUHQWVXESURJUDPVPDQDJHPHQWRI VFDODQGKXPDQUHVRXUFHV
facilitating communication, and providing leadership and vision. The successful candidate
would oversee the teaching, scholarship, research and outreach missions of the department;
serve as an advocate for the department to the college and university administration; work as
the liaison with industry, government and professional organizations; identify, recruit, hire and
mentor new faculty members; promote creativity and scholarship among the faculty, staff,
and students; advance and expand the departments externally sponsored research programs;
spearhead fund-raising efforts by cultivating support from corporate, governmental, alumni,
and private entities; develop and strengthen the departments interdisciplinary programs;
stimulate international collaborations in teaching and sponsored research; lead and foster
QHZSURJUDPVLQHPHUJLQJHOGVZLWKLQPLQLQJDQGPLQHUDOVHQJLQHHULQJDQGHQFRXUDJHDQG
enhance the participation and success of underrepresented populations.
Candidates must have an earned Doctoral degree in engineering or applied science that is
VXEVWDQWLDOO\UHODWHGWRWKHHOGRI PLQLQJDQGPLQHUDOVHQJLQHHULQJ7KLVPD\LQFOXGHEXWLV
not limited to, engineering disciplines such as mining engineering, geotechnical engineering,
geological engineering, metallurgical engineering, petroleum engineering, natural gas
HQJLQHHULQJHDUWKUHVRXUFHHQJLQHHULQJRURWKHUFORVHO\UHODWHGHOGV&DQGLGDWHVIURPRWKHU
engineering or applied science disciplines (e.g., civil, environmental, materials, mechanical,
geoscience, etc.) would also be considered provided they have demonstrated experience and
H[SHUWLVHUHODWHGWRWKHSURIHVVLRQDOHOGRI PLQLQJDQGPLQHUDOVHQJLQHHULQJ7KHVXFFHVVIXO
candidate must have academic credentials commensurate with appointment at rank of
Professor with tenure in the Mining and Minerals Engineering department. An endowed
SURIHVVRUVKLSPD\EHDYDLODEOHIRUZHOOTXDOLHGLQGLYLGXDOV
The Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering at Virginia Tech is one of the largest and
most prominent mining-related engineering programs in North America. The Department
currently enjoys a strong international reputation for its academic, research and outreach
programs. The Department is currently comprised of 10 full-time faculty members, with an
enrollment of 160-200 undergraduate and 35-40 graduate students. Research expenditures
in the Department, which are currently in excess of $6 million annually, consist of external
funding provided by state, federal, industry and private sources. The Department is housed
within the nationally ranked College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, whose undergraduate
program was ranked 8th and graduate program was ranked 12th among public engineering
schools in 2014 by U.S. News & World Report. Virginia Tech, the land-grant University of
the Commonwealth, is located in Blacksburg, Virginia, adjacent to the scenic Blue Ridge
Mountains. The university has a total enrollment of +30,000 with +7,000 students enrolled
within the College of Engineering. Blacksburg is consistently ranked among the countrys
best places to live and raise a family. Educational and economic information, crime rates,
amenities, air quality, and diversity are typical factors considered in the nationwide ranking.
Blacksburg is a high-tech hub located in a scenic and vibrant community in the New River
Valley between the Alleghany and Blue Ridge Mountains. The town is adjacent to state parks,
trails, and other regional attractions of Southwest Virginia, which are renowned for their
history and natural beauty. For more information about the university and surrounding
region, please visit www.vt.edu.
Candidates who wish to be considered for this position should apply online at www.jobs.
vt.edu to posting number TR0150163. Interested applicants should submit a cover letter,
vision statement, statement of leadership style and experience, and curriculum vitae.
Applications should also include contact information for at least three individuals willing to
provide references, although references will only be contacted for those candidates who are
selected for short list/phone interviews. The review of applications will begin on January
ZLWKWKHLQWHQWWRKDYHWKHSRVLWLRQOOHGEHIRUH$XJXVW6FUHHQLQJRI 
DSSOLFDWLRQVZLOOFRQWLQXHXQWLOWKHSRVLWLRQLVOOHG)RUIXUWKHULQIRUPDWLRQUHJDUGLQJWKLV
announcement, please visit the Mining & Minerals Engineering Department website at www.
mining.vt.edu. Questions regarding the search may also be directed to Dr. Gerald Luttrell
(luttrell@vt.edu) who serves as chair of the departmental search committee.
Virginia Tech is committed to the principle of diversity and, in that spirit, seeks a broad
spectrum of candidates including women, minorities and people with disabilities. As an
AA/EEO employer, applications from members of underrepresented groups are especially
encouraged. Virginia Tech is a recipient of a National Science Foundation ADVANCE
Institutional Transformation Award to increase the participation of women in academic
science and engineering careers.
67
 Technical Assessment of Resource Opportunity Set repeated for each opportunity in the Op-
1.0 tions, Possibilities, and Barrier Oppor-
Unidentified
0.9 Cut-Offs tunities categories. The resultant effi-
600
Sweep ciency factors are then used to calculate
0.8 Not
System Pressure
Produced
the new recovery factors for each oppor-
Pore Scale 500
0.7 tunity set.
Eff Factors

Volume (million BOE)

The aim is to compare the recovery
Recovery Factor

0.6
RTL
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
Remaining
0.1 Produced
0 0
Sanctioned Options
Fig. 1Screenshot from the system tool used for internal consistency checks.
Stacked bars refer to volumes from the opportunities (top-down), and the
short thick black horizontal lines represent the efficiency-based recovery
factors (bottoms-up).
operational, or commercial
barrier preventing their current
progression. These are currently
unfeasible or uneconomical and
can progress only with a step
change in technology, cost, or
commercial framework.
One Stop for
Everything JPT
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content in one place at
www.spe.org/jpt
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not available.
400
300
200
100
Possibilities Barrier Remaining
Quality Control. The identified op-
portunities are quality controlled to en-
sure that they are consistent and reason-
able when compared with other fields.
This is performed in two ways: first, with
an internal consistency check (within the
field under review), and second, with
an external consistency check through
comparison with performance data from
analogous fields.
The internal consistency check is car-
ried out on the basis of the efficiency
framework through evaluation of the
overall recovery factor in two distinct
and independent ways.
1. The identified opportunities are as-
sociated with incremental volumes that
they are expected to deliver once im-
plemented, regardless of whether these
are ranked as Options, Possibilities, or
Barrier Opportunities. These volumes
are summed together with the vol-
umes already produced, then divided
by the in-place hydrocarbon volume to
obtain the theoretical recovery factor
for each opportunity set if it were to
beimplemented.
2. The same opportunities aim to im-
prove one or more of the component
efficiency factors. As a result, each op-
portunity is associated with one or more
efficiency factors, and estimates are
made of how much these would be in-
creased once the opportunity is imple-
mented. Input from the field team and
challenges from the external technical
experts are crucial at this stage. This is
factor calculated with these two indepen-
dent approaches. This quality control of
the opportunity set is aided by the use
of the internal consistency check built
into the system tools. Recovery factors
derived from the sum of the opportunity
volumes (a top-down approach) should
be similar to those obtained from the
efficiency-factor increments (a bottoms-
up approach). The input volumes and ef-
ficiency factors are dynamically linked to
a summary plot in the system tool, as il-
lustrated in Fig. 1.
The external consistency check is then
completed, referring to the companys
extensive Reservoir Performance Bench-
marking toolkit. The gas benchmarking
process is based on a proprietary data-
base of more than 800 producing gas
fields and reservoirs. The toolkit allows
the recovery factors from the system re-
view to be compared with those from
identified analog fields.
Report. This stage consists of two
main activities: first, closing out the
system workbook, incorporating all of
the identified opportunities and asso-
ciated volumes; second, drawing up a
resource-progression work plan, cover-
ing all opportunities with clearly defined
timelines and accountability for activ-
ity. The finalized workbook is submit-
ted to the central subsurface-function
team in order to maintain the global
systemdatabase.
Resource Progression. The systems
software suite and supporting documen-
tation facilitate the process and enable
the outcome of the review to be captured,
analyzed, and presented in a consistent
manner. Once a review is completed,
the field team creates and updates their
resource-progression hopper and the
resulting opportunity set is progressed
through a defined resource-progression
work plan incorporating all identified op-
portunities with clearly defined timelines
and actions to progress.
Three case studies highlighting appli-
cation of the system are described in the
complete paper. JPT

68 JPT DECEMBER 2015

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS

Production and Facilities

Ted Frankiewicz, SPE, Engineering Adviser, SPEC Services

Advances in technologies for produc-
tion and facilities are being driven by
the development of unconvention-
al resources and the need for more-
efficient and -reliable operations. Con-
siderable progress is being made, for
example, on the design and performance
of wellbore-inflow-control devices. The
objective of this technology is to con-
trol both the volume and the charac-
ter of fluids entering an extended-length
wellbore. Both passive and autonomous
devices are now available from a number
of suppliers. Field experience with this
technology was the subject of 10% of the
papers in this years survey of publica-
tions and presentations.
Pipeline technology continues its
rapid evolution with a focus on the
safe operation of, and the early detec-
tion of breaks and leaks in, long-
distance lines. The environmental haz-
ards associated with unplanned fluid
losses from material failures or unwel-
come human intervention make the
deployment of acoustic monitoring tech-
nologies increasingly desirable and eco-
nomically viable. In some geographical
areas, strong environmental and safety
concerns about pipelines will most likely
favor the installation of such technolo-
One interesting
development associated
with production
optimization is the use
of nanotechnologies
to address issues ranging
from the control of rock
wettability characteristics
to the development
of fluids with improved
heat-transfer
characteristics.
gies on any line passing through urban
or other sensitiveenvironments.
With low oil and gas prices being a
continuing drag on our industry, a sig-
nificant amount of work was reported
on field-optimization and operations-
improvement (i.e., cost-reduction) tech-
nology. Authors worldwide described
their efforts to reduce unplanned shut-
downs, lower maintenance costs, improve
operational reliability, and squeeze more
barrels out of existing wells by develop-
ing field-optimization models.
One interesting development asso-
ciated with production optimiza-
tion is the use of nanotechnologies to
address issues ranging from the con-
trol of rock wettability characteris-
tics to the development of fluids with
improved heat-transfer characteris-
tics. These applications are moving the
field of nanomaterials from the charac-
ter of science projects to emerging or
commercialtechnologies.
Finally, the trend toward the increased
use of modeling and simulation technol-
ogies, which was identified in this fea-
ture last year, continues unabated. More
than 25% of the papers reviewed for
this years feature were concerned with
the development of models and simula-
tions or were associated with their use
and validation. The emphasis was heavy
on the generation of models and simula-
tions that were simple to use, were com-
putationally efficient, and that gener-
ated short-term realizable cost savings.
One interesting paper described the
development of a fuzzynistic model for
more accurate predictions of flow pat-
terns and pressure losses in pipelines, a
critical topic for the design and opera-
tional control of surface facilities.JPT

Recommended additional reading

Ted Frankiewicz, SPE, has more than 30 years of experience with
oilfield process systems and produced-water treatment. He holds
a PhD degree in physical chemistry from the University of Chicago.
Frankiewicz holds 15 patents. His experience includes hands-on
operations, equipment design and manufacturing, and process
engineering. Frankiewicz has worked for Occidental Petroleum,
Unocal, Natco Group, and SPEC Services. At Unocal, he was
responsible for developing water-treatment systems for the Gulf
of Thailand to remove mercury and arsenic as well as residual oil from produced water.
At SPEC Services, Frankiewicz designed equipment and process systems for, and
diagnosed performance issues with, facilities and water-treatment systems for major
and independent operators. He was an SPE Distinguished Lecturer in 200910 and is a
member of the JPT Editorial Committee.
at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org.
IPTC 17977 Performance of Autonomous-
Inflow-Control Completion in Heavy-Oil
Reservoirs by Eltazy Eltaher, Heriot-Watt
University, et al.
SPE 174812 Fuzzynistic Models for
Multiphase-Flow-Pattern Identification
by Florentina Popa, Halliburton, et al.
SPE 174746 CFD Study for Heat Transfer
and Flow Characteristics of Nanofluid in
a Flat-Tube Heat Exchanger by Mohamed
Elsebay, Gempetco, et al.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 69

 Optimized Design of Autonomous Inflow-
Control Devices for Gas and Water Coning

S everal designs for autonomous

inflow-control devices (AICDs) are
available. One forces inflowing fluids
1.2

AICD 2 Discharge Coefficient

1
to enter gates, depending on inertial
and viscous forces of the various fluids.
Another is an autonomous valve in 0.8
AICD 2 Discharge
the shape of a free-floating disk that Coefficient
restricts the flow rate of low-viscosity 0.6
fluids and is primarily used to choke
gas and water inflow. Recently, a device 0.4 Nozzle Discharge
Coefficient
with water-swellable rubber inside
the nozzle has been proposed, but it 0.2
is not yet commercially available. The
comparative properties and abilities of 0
these designs are the focus of this paper. 1 100 10,000 1,000,000
Rem
Well Model, Reservoir
Simulator, and Optimizer Fig. 1Fitting of AICD 2 data to mixture Reynolds number, compared with a
nozzle-based ICD.
The well model used in this work is part
of a next-generation parallel commer-
cial reservoir simulator and features a ICDs, AICDs may or may not have moving device segments; a possible config-
flexible multisegmented well topology, parts but they can change or modify their uration depicting reservoir grid cells,
enhanced robustness for difficult prob- state in response to inflow. Design of the their connections to an annulus, the de-
lems, and extensive well-model options. AICD determines the particular unwanted vice, and the main tubing segments in
It forms part of a scalable parallel com- fluids that are delayed. There are a num- the well model is shown in Fig. 2 of
mercial reservoir simulator. ber of types available commercially, in- the complete paper. Depending on the
Optimizations carried out in this work cluding a floating flapper, an oil-selector field-completion strategy, there may be
used an optimizer developed to alleviate valve, an autonomous inflow-control looped flowpaths where fluid entering
the computational cost in an optimiza- valve, the rate-controlled-production the well through well-to-cell connec-
tion study where simulation-based ob- (RCP) valve, and a fluidic diode valve. An- tions can move in either direction along
jective functions are expensive to evalu- other design recently proposed is based the annulus in order to find the easiest
ate. When compared with several other on inclusion of water-swellable rubber path into the main tubing.
commonly used optimizers, it was dem- within the nozzle, but this is not yet com-
onstrated that this optimizer outper- mercially available. Both ICDs and AICDs AICD 1. Flow performance of the first
formed others significantly. are often deployed in a compartment AICD used in this work is based on the
whose edges are sealed with a packer, and general flow response of a device re-
Modeling Inflow-Control are placed in the tubing wall between an ferred to as an RCP valve. There is a
Devices (ICDs) annulus and main production stream. free-floating disk that moves toward the
Various ICD designs include those with These devices are modeled in ad- inlet and chokes flow when low-viscosity
nozzle orifices, tubes, and helices. Unlike vanced multisegment well models as fluids such as gas flow through the de-
vice. More-viscous fluids produce an in-
crease in friction loss so that pressure
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of
on the rear side of the disk decreases,
paper SPE 173203, Optimized Design of Autonomous Inflow-Control Devices for Gas the disk moves away from the inlet, and
and Water Coning, by Terry W. Stone, Terje Moen, David A. Edwards, Alexander higher inflow rates occur.
Shadchnev, and Kashif Rashid, Schlumberger, and Geir Frode Kvilaas and Kjell Data were used to fit device perfor-
Christoffersen, Det Norske Oljeselskap, prepared for the 2015 SPE Reservoir Simulation mance approximately with calibration
Symposium, Houston, 2325 February. The paper has not been peer reviewed. physical quantities and equations pro-

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

70 JPT DECEMBER 2015

vided in the complete paper. The fit is
only approximate, and is used to com-
pare the general flow response of this
AICD design with that of other devices
and an openhole base case.
AICD 2. A fluidic diode device is de-
signed to allow the flow of desirable
fluids such as oil and restrict the flow
of undesirable fluids such as water. Fur-
ther improvements to this design allow
more-autonomous on/off switching.
Fig.1 shows a fit of the device-discharge
coefficient vs. mixture Reynolds num-
ber. Fig. 1 also compares the discharge
coefficient for this type of device with
that of a standard ICD nozzle. Again, this
fit is only approximate.
AICD 3. Flow performance of this de-
vice, based on a hypothetical appara-
tus, is designed to hold back the multi-
phase flow depending on water cut. It is
based on a nozzle-type ICD in which a
water-swelling rubber is installed direct-
ly into the nozzle. When water break-
through occurs, the rubber swells, caus-
ing a decrease in nozzle area dependent
on water cut.
To model this particular device, the
multisegment well model in the simu-
lator was extended such that internal
constraints may be imposed on the flow
through any segment pipe. These con-
straints are an upper limit on either a
pipes molar rate or oil/water/gas volume
rate, calculated at reservoir or surface
conditions. If a limit is exceeded, then
flow through the segment pipe is auto-
matically choked back such that the con-
strained flow rate stays at the limiting
value and the internal constraint is said
to be active. At a later point in the sim-
ulation, an internal constraint may be-
come inactive if the limited rate cannot
be sustained; flow then drops below the
limit, and automatic choking is disabled.
Field Application of AICDs
The simulation study is based on the Ivar
Aasen field (formerly Draupne field), lo-
cated in the northern part of the North
Sea, west of the Johan Sverdrup field.
The main deposit is a midsized sand-
stone oil field at a depth of approximate-
ly 2400 m in an approximately 60-m-
thick oil column with a mobility ratio of
water to oil of less than unity. Most of the
JPT DECEMBER 2015
production is limited by process capaci-
ty, first on oil capacity and then on liquid
or water capacity. Field life is estimated
to be 20 years.
Optimization of AICD
Strengths and Design
Studies were carried out to determine
optimum AICD cross-sectional areas and
device calibration exponents. To deter-
mine the range of cross-sectional areas,
device nozzles can be configured in
groups of one, two, three, or four, with
diameters ranging between 1.6, 2.5, and
4 mm. This permits a continuous range
of cross-sectional areas between a single
nozzle of 1.6-mm diameter to four noz-
zles of 4-mm diameter each.
A total of 237 AICDs are specified
among the six production wells, with a
single device assigned to a 12-m joint.
Simulation run time for each run is ap-
proximately 60 minutes (on four cores).
Clearly, the total number of optimization
variables is too large for a practical opti-
mization study. There are several ways
to handle large optimization problems
of this type. The direct-continuous ap-
proach is chosen for the current work, in
which the effective cross-sectional area
of each device is defined over a continu-
ous domain. Furthermore, to reduce the
number of simulation variables, groups
of AICDs in each well are assigned the
same set of four variables. Grouping
of these variables was determined by
productivity as a function of measured
depth along each well. Producer 1 (with
37 devices) was divided into two groups,
Producer 2 (with 47 devices) was divided
into four groups, Producer 3 (with 56 de-
vices) was divided into four groups, Pro-
ducer 4 (with 16 devices) was presented
as one group, Producer 5 (with 46 de-
vices) was divided into four groups, and
Producer 6 (with 37 devices) was divided
into three groups. This gives a total of 18
groups among the six producers, and,
significantly, only 72 control variables
for optimization purposes.
Ability To Improve Oil
Production and Control Water
To determine the ability of the three
AICD designs to improve oil produc-
tion and control water production, first,
two simulations were run in which all
wells were equipped with AICD Device
1 or AICD Device 2, using optimal cross-
sectional areas; second, a simulation
was run in which Device 3, with cross-
sectional areas directly determined by
water cut, was installed in all wells. Cu-
mulative oil and water were compared
for all three devices. Cumulative oil at
the end of production is similar for De-
vices 1 and 2 compared with the base
case, although Devices 1 and 2 produce
less during the middle of the cycle. De-
vice 3 produces less oil. Cumulative
water is greatly improved (reduced)
with Device 3, which directly responds
to water cut in each device. Device 1 also
shows improved (less) water production
for much of the production cycle, al-
though by the end of production at 23
years, it has caught up to the openhole
case. Device 2 produces a little more
water by the end of the production pe-
riod. Comparing actual production val-
ues, wells equipped withDevices 1 and 2
produced approximately 390 000 std m3
of additional oil compared with open-
hole production, and those with Device
3 produced 1 932 000 std m3 less oil.
Regarding cumulative water produced,
wells with Device 1 produced an addi-
tional 360 000 std m3 of water, wells
with Device 2 produced an additional
1 440 000 additional std m3 of water,
and producers equipped with Device 3
produced 90 110 000 std m3 less water
than open hole.
Discussion
Although these results are tentative be-
cause of the approximate nature of the
curve fitting for Devices 1 and 2 and
the hypothetical response of Device 3 to
water, wells equipped with AICD 1, based
on a commercially available design, con-
trolled water better than those with
Device 2 while demonstrating similar
improved oil production. AICD 1 also
matched optimum values of calibra-
tion parameters better than Device 2.
Device 3, not commercially available,
showed less oil but a dramatic decrease
in water production compared with the
first two devices. When properly opti-
mized with full-field dynamic reservoir
simulations, both ICDs and AICDs im-
prove revenue and control water. This
suggests that the strength of the device
may be the most important parameter
for this field. JPT
71
 Deployment of a Remote Acoustic Monitoring
System for Pipeline-Asset Integrity

S ince 2007, an operator in Nigeria

has registered a significant
increase of oil-spill events caused
by sabotage and oil-theft activities.
The risks for personnel safety and
environmental protection were such
that it was decided to investigate new
detection and monitoring systems.
The technology presented here allows
detecting and locating leaks taking
place at a distance from the sensor of
up to 35 km.

Introduction Fig. 1Satellite view of the Kwale and Akri terminals flanking the Niger River.
The technology of this system is based
upon discrete vibroacoustic sensing.
This technology takes advantage of the Vibroacoustic monitoring implies the ad hoc radio links). The acoustic and
fact that any acoustic signal reaching, recording of the low-frequency elastic elastic waves produced by flow varia-
or generated upon, the pipeline will waves traveling along the pipe body by tions propagate along the pipeline and
introduce vibroacoustic waves within use of accelerometers and geophones, are recorded at the monitoring stations.
the pipeline body and the transported- and of the pressure wave traveling into Multichannel processing of the collect-
fluid medium (crude oil, brine, and nat- the fluid by use of hydrophones. When ed signals enables the detection, local-
ural gas). In addition to the general the sensors are placed on both sides of ization, and classification of the trigger-
noise of the fluid flow within the pipe- a source point, cross-correlation tech- ing events.
line, these acoustic waves are transport- niques enable the localization of the ori- The system has been tested in single-
ed along the conduit for long distances. gin point. If only one recording point is phase and multiphase transportation
Especially within the fluid, the sound available, it is possible to take advantage lines during several field campaigns in
propagation is expected to travel sever- of the different propagation velocity of order to obtain
al kilometers, depending on the density the acoustic waves in the pipe shell and Sound-propagation parameters
of the medium and the pipe diameter. in the inner fluid. within the fluid
In the pipe body, because of the vari- Environmental noise produced
ability of the boundary conditions, the Vibroacoustic Technology by flow-generation/-regulation
calculation of the sound propagation The system comprises a discrete net- equipment
is complex, but mathematical analyses work of pressure and vibration sensors Pressure-noise level produced by
proved the existence of modal solutions installed on the pipeline at relative dis- leak events
that are allowed to travel several kilome- tances of tens of kilometers. Communi- Vibroacoustic transients generated
ters. Moreover, for high-density fluids cation between the acquisition systems by operating pigs
(i.e., crude oil or brine), the acous- and the control unit can be implement- Now, only 5 years after the begin-
tic waves can be measured across the ed with different options (existing pri- ning of the research-and-development
pipeshell. vate network, wired or wireless, or with effort, there are four systems installed
and fully operational in industrial sites:
Three of them are in Italy, and one is in
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights
the Kwale/Akri pipeline, which is the
of paper SPE 171763, Field Deployment of an Innovative Acoustic Monitoring focus of this paper.
System for Remote Real-Time Pipeline-Asset Integrity, by R. Schiavon, Tecnomare;
G.Bernasconi, Politecnico di Milano; G. Giunta and G.P. Borghi, Eni; and N. Okere, Kwale/Akri Pipeline
NAOC, prepared for the 2014 Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Kwale and Akri pumping stations are
Conference, Abu Dhabi, 1013 November. The paper has not been peer reviewed. connected by a water/oil-mixture-

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

72 JPT DECEMBER 2015

transportation pipeline. The pipe, locat-
ed in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria
(Fig. 1), has a length of 17.3 km and an
internal diameter of 10 in. The pipeline
system has a capacity of 50,000 B/D;
it starts from Kwale, then arrives at
Akri where it gathers Akri wells, then
changes pipe diameters (up to 14 in.)
and continues to Ebocha (22 km
from Akri).
As per most other existing pipelines
of the operator, because of the high
probability of theft or vandalization of
instruments, installing sensors on the
pipeline outside the facilities (pumping
stations and terminals) is not consid-
ered a viable option. The actual installed
system is made up of two measuring sta-
tions placed at both ends of the pipe-
line (inside the Akri and Kwale plants), a
data-communication system, and a cen-
tral server at Kwale in the control room
for system control, data acquisition and
storage, and spill alerts. Detailed de-
scriptions of the monitoring stations
and control rooms are provided in the
completepaper.
Data Analysis
The sensors were installed in July 2013
as part of the qualification process of
the technology. In May 2014, 10 months
of continuous and global-positioning-
system (GPS) synchronized pressure
data were analyzed thoroughly. This ac-
tivity allowed building statistics aimed
at the following objectives:
Assess operational range and
pressure-transient noise produced
by flow-generation/-regulation
equipment.
Obtain propagation parameters
of sound within the transported
water/oil mixture.
Check actual monitoring-system
performance and define possible
improvements.
The Kwale-Akri-pipeline transported
fluid is a mixture of crude oil and water
in approximately even amounts. The
signals from all the sensors were ana-
lyzed in detail.
All pressure transients that are not
generated by a leak or spill inside the
monitored pipeline are, for the purpose
of asset-integrity monitoring, consid-
ered noise that adds to the base noise
of the fluid flow inside the pipeline.
JPT DECEMBER 2015
Every active piece of equipment of the
pipeline, such as pumps or valves, gen-
erates pressure transients that have to
be considered in the noise analysis, as
well as any events located outside of the
monitored pipeline able to generate vi-
broacoustic effects inside the pipeline.
Noise estimation and subtraction are,
hence, key steps for the correct detec-
tion of spill events occurring along the
pipeline. For this purpose, an advanced
software has been developed to detect
only events occurring inside a specif-
ic pipeline trunk. This noise-removal
processing is crucial for the identifi-
cation and rejection of false alarms
and for the correct localization of
spill events.
Analyses performed in the Kwale/
Akri pipeline showed that operational
noises are present traveling in both di-
rections, with comparable size.
The system is also able to deal with
local noise that does not propagate.
Local noise present in the Kwale/Akri
system is in fact mostly caused by
twoevents:
Mechanical vibrations and pressure
noise during daily fluid sampling
Pressure noise during chemical
injection (noise that appears at
intervals of tens of seconds for
some hours a day)
Another source of operational noise
is related to any action resulting from
product-transportation policy, able to
generate fast pressure transients.
Spill Tests
On 13 and 14 May 2014, a spill campaign
was performed in the Akri and Kwale fa-
cilities, repectively. This campaign had
the aim of system calibration and tun-
ing to the best parameter settings. The
spills were performed near the moni-
toring stations inside the plants bor-
ders. Different-diameter spills were per-
formed (-, -, -, and 1-in.) with time the overview of the system (sen-
different spill modes, in order to obtain
a comprehensive set of events (17 spills
carried out in Akri and 10 spills carried
out in Kwale).
No spills were performed out-
side the pumping stations because
the monitored trunk did not have any
pipe junctions available for installing
the spill equipment. For that reason,
synthetic spills were simulated, tak-
ing into account the magnitude of the
test performed during the spill cam-
paign. The system correctly generat-
ed the event notification in 5 minutes
from the occurrence of the spills and
sent email and short-message-service
(SMS) alarms.
Communication and
Web-Based User Interface
A dedicated server was installed in
the Kwale control room with the fol-
lowing software platforms: acquisi-
tion software, for collecting the sen-
sor signals; preprocessor software,
for reorganizing and processing the
data in order to speed up the subse-
quent in-depth processing phases; and
core-processor software, for analyz-
ing and processing all incoming data
and checking for possible events and
anomalies occurring over the line.
The core processor furthermore pro-
duces a series of data containing the
recorded-signal features thatconstitute
a long-term analysis (LTA) dedicated to
line-efficiencymonitoring.
For the actual remote monitoring of
the pipeline, a user interface is avail-
able based upon the availability of the
operators private network connection.
The system is provided with a graph-
ic user interface that allows real-time
display of the status of the pipeline,
to remotely control the system and to
send alerts and alarms by email and
SMS. It is a web application with a con-
trolled access (four levels with user-
name and password). The software uses
an SQL Server Compact database for
managing users and their accounts, and
a file-transfer-protocol (FTP) client for
connecting to the FTP-server data cen-
ter and the FTP server where the data
acquisition, storage, and processing
are performed.
The web application shows in real
sors, processing, communication, GPS,
and leak); when a spill occurs, a specific
symbol appears on the pipeline image
in the position of the event. This allows
any technician to be alerted and to un-
derstand what is happening and where.
Moreover, the web application allows
display of the traces recorded and pro-
cessed during the event, for a further
verification by LTA. JPT
73
 A Study of Wettability-Alteration Methods
With Nanomaterials Application
T he use of nanomaterials for
alteration of wettability is a method
that has grown in prominence after
the development of techniques for
synthesizing nanosized particles in the
late 1980s. In this paper, after a review
of the fundamentals of wettability
alteration, a discussion of nanomaterials
used for wettability alteration is
provided. Among these nanomaterials,
nanoparticles of silica and polysilicone
indicate better results in terms of
efficiency on incremental oil recovery
inwaterflooding.
Introduction
Wettability is the tendency of a fluid to
spread over a specific surface and is rela-
tive to other existent fluids in that system
and is defined by the contact angle of a
droplet of the fluid and the surface. It is
a result of adhesion forces between the
fluid and the minerals of the rock. The
wettability of a rock ranges from strong-
ly water-wet to strongly oil-wet and is a
result of brine/oil/rock interactions in
a reservoir. There are different types of
rocks on the basis of these interactions
and wettabilities:
1. If no, or equal, tendency is shown
from oil or brine to spread over the sur-
face of the rock, the system is said to
have neutral wettability or intermedi-
ate wettability.
2. Because different mineralogies coex-
ist in an oil reservoir, different wettabili-
ties are also expected. If this variety in the
reservoir is not negligible, then, in differ-
ent parts of the reservoir, different chemi-
cal interactions between fluids and rocks
are observed and, consequently, some
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of
paper SPE 173884, A Review Study of Wettability-Alteration Methods With Regard
to Nanomaterials Application, by Milad Jokari Sheshdeh, Technical University
of Clausthal, prepared for the 2015 SPE Bergen One Day Seminar, Bergen, Norway,
22April. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.
74
areas of the reservoir indicate strongly
water-wet behavior whereas some other
areas indicate strongly oil-wet behavior.
This heterogeneous wettability behavior
is known as fractional wettability.
3. In some cases, the smaller pores are
occupied by water and can be considered
water-wet, while larger pores are cap-
tured by oil. This type of wettability dis-
tribution is known as mixed wettability,
in which the residual oil saturation is low
because the oil is displaced more easily
from larger pores.
The solid/fluid and fluid/fluid surface
energies are governed by the chemical
compositions of the fluid and rock. In
other words, the mineralogy of a rock
and chemical properties of the fluid influ-
ence the relative adhesive tensions and,
consequently, wettability.
The most common methods for wet-
tability measurements, discussed in
detail in the complete paper, include
thefollowing:
1. Amott wettability index
2. US Bureau of Mines (USBM) wetta-
bility index
3. Combined Amott-USBM wettabili-
ty test
4. Contact-angle methods
Because any clean rock exhibits
water-wetting behavior, it is believed that
all petroleum reservoirs were initially
water-wet. This water was later displaced
by oil because of migration, and some-
times there is a shift to relatively oil-
wet compared with the initial wetting
tendency. Some polar components of oil
then act as surfactants and penetrate
through the thin film of water on the pore
surfaces and adsorb strongly on the rock.
On the basis of the component miner-
als, some rocks have water-wetting or oil-
wetting natures. In a water-wet medium,
water captures the small pores and also
coats the surface of the larger pores while
oil filaments are in the larger pores on
the mentioned water surface. The water
relative permeability in larger pores is
small both before coreflooding (because
presence of oil prohibits water mobility)
and after coreflooding (because the re-
sidual oil saturation impedes water rela-
tive permeability).
In an oil-wet system, the positions of
the fluids are reversed, and during water-
flooding, the water relative permeabil-
ity in larger pores increases and impedes
the oil movement faster than in a water-
wet system. In other words, an oil-wet
system is not a good candidate for water-
flooding compared with a water-wet sys-
tem because more oil would reside in an
oil-wet system after water breakthrough.
In some cases in which the oil-/water-
viscosity ratios are high, breakthrough
happens very early and the residual oil
saturation becomes significant.
Wettability-Alteration Methods
Several methods are used to alter wet-
tability. Most of these methods can-
not be used in large scale because of
their expense and are only used to treat
small cores for experiments that require
cores of different wettabilities. These
wettability-alteration methods include
thefollowing.
Treatment With Organosilanes. Organo-
silanes are widely used as wettability-
altering agents in different industries.
In other fields, they are used as hy-
drophobic agents, which can be in-
terpreted as oil-wetting agents in the
petroleumindustry.
Treatment With Naphthenic Acids.
Naphthenic acids are long chains of
JPT DECEMBER 2015
heavy organic compounds; the label re-
fers to all the carboxylic acids seen in
crude oil. They are viscous and insoluble
in water but completely soluble in organ-
ic solvents and oil. Because of their tox-
icity, environmental hazards, and high
viscosity, they can be used only in labo-
ratory scales to alter wettability. In gen-
eral, naphthenic acids make a carbonate
core more oil-wet because of the reaction
of the naphthenic acid and calcium car-
bonates. However, silica cores show the
opposite behavior.
Treatment With Asphaltenes. As-
phaltenes are heavy componenets of
crude oil that are considered polar. As
mentioned previously, all rocks are con-
sidered to be initially water-wet, although
during oil migration some of them turned
partially oil-wet. Presence of asphaltenes
in crude oil is one of the reasons for this
wettability alteration. Asphaltenes rup-
ture the thin film of water and are ad-
sorped to the rock surface in large pores,
which can cause the larger pores to ex-
hibit oil-wetting behavior.
Thermal Methods. During the oil migra-
tion that turned water-wet rocks to par-
tially oil-wet rocks, when a critical cap-
illary pressure was reached, the heavy
oil components penetrated through the
thick water films on the pore surfac-
es and, by deposition on the surface,
made the surface oil-wet. This process
can be reversed by heating in silicate
rocks. Heating causes the deposited (ad-
sorbed) active agents to be desorbed,
leaving a water-wet surface again. Most
of the naturally fractured reservoirs show
oil-wetting behavior, and, therefore,
waterflooding would not be successful
in these systems. Water will imbibe into
the cores but will only pass through the
fractures and result in very low recover-
ies. However, by heating the reservoir by
hot water or steam injection, the system
could exhibit more-water-wetting behav-
ior and higher recoveries may result. The
water front locates the wetting transition.
Surfactants. Surfactants are the only ma-
terials also used on a large scale to alter
the wettability and improve the recov-
ery. By use of these surfactants and caus-
tics, the interfacial tension is reduced
and more oil is produced; however, be-
JPT DECEMBER 2015
cause of adsorption of these surfactants HLP makes a system more oil-wet, and,
and the precipitation caused by the pres- in contrast, LHP makes a system more
ence of divalent cations in the brine, only water-wet. By adding LHP to a water-
5% incremental oil is produced. Because wet system, the media become extreme-
of the high residual oil saturation, an oil- ly water-wet, which would hinder fluid
wet reservoir is typically not a good can- movement in flooding. The third type of
didate for waterflooding; however, by use NPS, which is NWP, reduces the interfa-
of surfactants, the interfacial tension can cial tension between the oil and forma-
be reduced or the wettability can be shift- tion water. Each of these nanoparticles
ed toward a more-water-wetting system, needs a carrier fluid that preserves par-
which improves the recovery factor. ticle wetting characteristics. Alcohols are
suggested for use with NWP and HLP; in
Wettability Alteration particular, ethanol is reported to be the
With Nanomaterials best choice because it is converted from
Use of nanomaterials is a recent, and in a very weak surfactant to a very good sur-
many cases highly effective, method of factant and reduces the interfacial ten-
wettability alteration. Because the sizes sion significantly. Water is suggested to
of particles are reduced, their effective- be used as a carrier fluid while using LHP.
ness is greatly increased. However, this As mentioned previously, an oil-wet
precision in wettability alteration causes system results in a high residual oil satu-
the method to become more expensive ration after flooding, while a water-wet
and less feasible. system is typically a better candidate for
In most cases, the wettability of a core waterflooding. However, the best system
has to be modified to reach a preferable for flooding is an intermediate system in
oil recovery; however, in some rare cases which, ideally, no preference for any of
(mostly experimental), a surface with a the fluids is shown from the rock surface.
specific wettability is needed and there- Therefore, the aim of any wettability-
fore the fabrication of surfaces with a alteration process would be to alter the
specific wettability is required. Adjust- system to an intermediate status. JPT
ing the wettability of a surface by nano-
structures while it is being fabricated can
be achieved by electrochemical methods,
plasma etching, or electrospraying.
Nanopolysilicone (NPS) is a nanopar-
ticle used to alter the wettability in cores.
NPSs are classified into three groups:
lyophobic and hydrophilic polysilicone
(LHP), neutrally wetting polysilicone
(NWP), and hydrophobic lipophilic poly-
silicone (HLP).
By adsorption of LHP on the pore sur-
face, the oil-wetting system would be al-
tered to water-wet, which would increase
the relative permeability of oil and de-
crease the oil relative permeability. This
situation is favorable in a waterflood-
ing process. NWP adsorption reduces the
surface tension and increases the oil rela-
tive permeability generally, which is also
favorable. However, adsorption of HLP is
not favorable because it makes the pore
surface oil-wet, which would increase the
residual oil saturation in a flooding pro-
cess. HLPs are transferred by diffusion
and convection, and, in the case of accu-
mulation, they would cause pore block-
age and reduction in porosity and abso-
lute permeability.
75
 TECHNOLOGY FOCUS

Bit Technology and Bottomhole Assemblies

Casey McDonough, SPE, Drilling Manager, American Energy Partners

A bronze statue of Will Rogers provid- have merit today. But is the prohibition
ed by the state of Oklahoma in 1939 on crude-oil exports still necessary? The
stands in a unique position in front of landscape has changed. The US in now a
the entrance to the US House of Repre- swing producer of crude.
sentatives chambers. Of the 100 statues President Ford continued the vision
provided by the 50 states, only Rogers statement in his State of the Union
statue is pointed toward the entrance of address. He pointed to goals for depend-
the House. Rogers, who derived much of able and domestic energy. The loftiest
his commentary material from Congress, goal he stated was, We must develop our
said before he died, Even after Im gone, energy technology and resources so that
Im gonna keep an eye on you. the United States has the ability to supply
In January 1975, President Gerald Ford a significant share of the energy needs
delivered his first State of the Union of the free world by the end of this cen-
address in the House of Representa- tury. While we did not achieve energy
tives chambers. The United States had independence at the end of the century,
just survived the oil embargo of 1973, that goal is now reachable. It was tech-
which resulted in a shortage of gasoline nology in oil exploration and extraction
and high energy prices. Energy indepen- (shale oil) that increased our production
dence was the focus of his address to the by more than 80% since 2008. Demand
nation and the impetus behind the Ener- has not kept up. Since June of 2014, oil
gy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975. prices have dropped 60%. The dura-
The act contained three main com- tion of the current low prices has already
ponents: (1) oil conservation through exceeded all downturns since the fall of
vehicle-fuel-economy standards, (2) the 1985, when the Saudis, while losing mar-
creation and direction of the Strategic ket share to other nation members of the
Petroleum Reserve, and (3) the prohibi- Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
tion on crude-oil exports. While no leg- Countries, increased oil production to
islation is perfect, the conservation of 10million B/D.
oil and the establishment of the Strate- Technology will play an increasing role
gic Petroleum Reserve are ideas that still in the lower-commodity-price environ-
Casey McDonough, SPE, is a drilling manager for American Energy
Partners. He has 10 years of practical drilling experience working
in the Permian basin and with the Barnett, Marcellus, and Utica
shales. McDonough has nearly 23 years of combined consulting,
managerial, technical, and field experience in the oil and gas
industry. He has worked as a consultant providing clients with
pore-pressure and wellbore-stability studies. McDonough also
held technical and managerial positions in downhole logging-
while-drilling development for Dresser and Halliburton, where he contributed to
density, neutron, vibration, and hot-hole technology. He began his career as a field
engineer for Sperry Sun Drilling Services and holds a BS degree in industrial engineering
from the University of Oklahoma. McDonough serves on the JPT Editorial Committee.
ment. Because horizontal and extended-
reach wellbores account for the majority
of the wells being drilled, technologies
geared around that development will
produce the highest returns. The under-
standing and proper application of
rotary-steerable systems will continue
to provide a step change in the way fields
are developed. Bit technology continues
to improve and innovate. It will take per-
formance and skill by both operators
and service companies to compete in
todays low-price environment. Technol-
ogy developed and implemented during
the boom will receive closer scrutiny and
evaluation during the bust.
For good fortune, legislators rub the
left shoe of the Will Rogers statue on the
way to chambers. That shoe has become
worn, like that of the statue of St. Peter
in Rome, by the touch of the devoted. In
January of 2017, the US will swear in a
new president and a new class of legisla-
tors. May the tradition continue and Will
Rogers good fortune encourage sensible
energy policy and favorable commod-
ityprices. JPT
Recommended additional reading
at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org.
SPE 173861 Precise Quantification of
Deformation of the BHA for Improved
Performance in Directional Drilling by
Przemyslaw Kukian, Weatherford, et al.
SPE/IADC 173168 Freeing Differential
Stuck Pipe With Nitrogen Reduces Lost-in-
Hole Drillstrings Significantly by Norbert
Heitmann, Schlumberger, et al.
SPE 174798 Analytical Model To Estimate
the Directional Tendency of Point- and
Push-the-Bit BHAs by Yuan Zhang,
Halliburton, et al.

76 JPT DECEMBER 2015

Designing and Testing of New
Rotary-Steerable System for Use Onshore

W hile rotary-steerable systems

(RSSs) dominate the offshore
directional-drilling markets, the land-
based markets are still dominated by
conventional directional-drilling tools.
This paper presents a new RSS that is
being designed and tested specifically
for the onshore markets. The new tool
is a short RSS that is designed to deliver
a buildup rate of 15/100 ft. It achieves
this by the movement of two eccentric
shafts relative to one another within
the tool.
Introduction
For directional drilling to be successful,
it is important that the drillers have in-
formation on the orientation of the tool
while they are drilling so they can best
align the wellbore orientation to the res-
ervoir target. Commonly, this is achieved
with a measurement-while-drilling
(MWD) tool that is typically 50ft or more
behind the drill bit. In some cases, these
measurements are supplemented with
some form of near-bit inclination read-
ing. A further improvement would be to
have both inclination and azimuth mea-
sured close to the bit and integrated into
the drilling tools directional response,
thereby enabling precise well placement
without the need to project and correct
continually from the MWD tool that lags
considerably behind the drilling tool.
This is the method adopted by the RSS
described in this paper.
In many cases, a downhole positive-
displacement motor will be used with the
RSS to increase rate of penetration (ROP)
and reduce casing wear by minimizing
This article, written by Special Publications Editor Adam Wilson, contains highlights
of paper SPE 173093, Designing and Testing a New Rotary-Steerable System (RSS) for
the Onshore Drilling Market, by Andrew Gorrara, SPE, Shona Grant, Tore Kvalvik,
SPE, and Stig Bakke, 2TD Drilling, and Peter Clark, SPE, Chevron, prepared for the
2015 SPE/IADC Dilling Conference and Exhibition, London, 1719 March. The paper
has not been peer reviewed.
string rotation. The RSS described in this
paper was designed to be driven directly
by the topdrive or with a mud motor.
Three prototypes of the new RSS have
been designed and tested so far. The first
prototype (Prototype A) successfully
demonstrated dogleg-severity capabili-
ty of 15/100 ft. The second prototype
(Prototype B) was designed to evaluate
the efficiency of the selected motor-gear
design in moving the eccentric shafts
when applying significant side loads. The
third prototype (Prototype C) was a com-
plete rotary-steerable tool that verified
all aspects of the design, culminating in
the drilling of directional holes in con-
crete blocks. This paper describes the
development of Prototype C, covering
design, manufacture, and the drill tests
that verified the 15/100 ft dogleg perfor-
mance through concrete-block drilling.
The paper also covers the subsequent de-
sign improvements made before manu-
facture of the field-test prototypes (Pro-
totype D) and the planned environmental
and endurance testing of Prototype D be-
fore field testing.
Background Theory
The RSS described in this paper is based
on the push-the-bit method for adjust-
ing the direction of the well path. The
position of the drill bit is controlled con-
tinuously by the direction and offset of
a near-bit stabilizer that is supported
on two eccentrically drilled sleeves. The
amount of eccentricity is exactly the
same for both sleeves so that, when they
are positioned opposite each other, the
net offset is zero and, therefore, the drill
bit will have no side force and will drill
straight ahead. As soon as the two sleeves
are rotated relative to each other, the bit
will be offset. The tool face and amount of
offset can be varied continuously, giving
smooth control of the drillstring orienta-
tion and buildup rate.
However, because this RSS con-
trols bit position by displacement of a
rigid, nonrotating stabilizer to alter the
bottomhole-assembly geometry rather
than moving external parts to apply a
side force to the borehole wall, the steer-
ing action described in this paper is ex-
pected to be less affected by changes in
formation strength. The three-point ge-
ometry model that is used to determine
the bent motor buildup rate is as appli-
cable to this RSS as is the resultant force
vector based on weight on bit (WOB) and
side force, leading to an RSS that is less
sensitive to the ratio of WOB to formation
strength. The side force being applied is
also not reliant on mud flow, so the tool
will operate in soft formations that are
liable to wash out. Another important
benefit of this relatively rigid steering
stabilizer is that fewer moving parts are
exposed to the borehole annulus; very lit-
tle movement of these parts is required to
effect a significant side force.
Development Process
Prototype A was made for an 8-in. drill
bit. After Prototype A had been tested,
a functional specification for the sys-
tem was developed. The specification was
fine-tuned during the testing of Proto-
type B and the development of Prototype
C. The lessons learned during the testing
of Prototype C and the subsequent de-
sign review informed the updating of the
functional specification for Prototype D,
the field-test-pilot series.
Prototype A. Prototype A was designed
and manufactured with short lead-time
motor and gear components (Fig. 1). The

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 77

 Fig. 1Prototype A.
prototype was built to prove the steering
concept and to measure steering forces.
Prototype B. Prototype B comprised a
new steering head that could deliver the
forces required to create a steering re-
sponse and survive the loads in a down-
hole drilling environment. This model
comprised a custom-designed hollow
motor and gear solution (Fig. 2).
Prototype C. The significant change for
Prototype C was that it was designed to
suit the drilling of 7-in. hole (Fig. 3).
The design was improved further by
splitting the motors/gears and stabilizer
steering section into two separate mod-
ules. This made it possible to isolate al-
most all of the steering stabilizers drill-
ing loads into a separate section of the
tool. Prototype C was a complete system
built to demonstrate that the steering
concept functioned in a predictable and
controllable manner while drilling.
Prototype D. Prototype D is the field-
test-pilot series based on Prototype C,
redesigned to meet requirements for a
production series run, including a mod-
ular design to make assembly and ser-
vicing simpler. It also benefits from in-
creased motor-gear efficiency through
improved bearing design and reduc-
tion of other losses, as well as an in-
creased temperature and pressure rat-
ing to meet real-world environmental
requirements. The overall geometry and
key design elements from Prototype C
weremaintained.
Testing
Simulating real-world drilling conditions
during testing of the RSS was always seen
as challenging. The main objective was
to ensure that the tool released for field
testing would be tested sufficiently to
avoid premature failures.
78
Fig. 2Prototype B.
Some testing equipment was obvi-
ous, such as ovens and vibration tables
for testing of electronics boards. Less
clear, initially, were the motor- and gear-
test setups, the horizontal-drilling ma-
chine, the endurance-test bench, and
the component-shock machine that were
identified as the RSS developed and ex-
isting testing mechanisms proved to
beinsufficient.
A bench-test setup was used for verify-
ing the efficiencies of motors and motor/
gearbox combinations, with power and
torque in and out being measured con-
tinuously. This test setup was critical in
evaluating improvements in the bearings
being used and in the configuration of
the gearbox.
A horizontal-drilling machine was
used for controllably applying WOB and
monitoring ROP. Coupled with a standard
900-hp mud pump and a conventional
mud motor, the system has a stroke of
10 ft, with two pneumatic cylinders pro-
viding up to 7 t of WOB and the option to
add drill collars as required to drill addi-
tional length.
A horizontal-test rig was used that can
rotate the assembly at up to 200 rev/min,
provide fluid circulation (up to 400 gal/
min to generate power and cool bear-
ings), and apply WOB and lateral bending
load to generate up to 50 G of axial shock
twice per revolution and apply a side load
along with drag force to the nonrotating
stabilizer. This rig was designed after the
initial drill tests through concrete proved
to be too smooth, with very little shock
and vibration. The goal was to provide
extended periods of controlled shock and
drilling loads to the whole system while it
was operating.
A single-axis shock machine was
used that was capable of generating up
to 200 G of shock approximately once
per second to assemblies weighing up
to 50 kg. The magnitude and duration
Fig. 3Prototype C.
of shock can be adjusted by modifying
the material used for contact when the
assembly is dropped and the height of
the cam used for operating the arm. The
shock generated is measured by an accel-
erometer mounted on the test assembly.
Conclusions
The new RSS development could sub-
stantially change the drilling landscape
within the unconventional plays in the US
land market. The tool is short and highly
maneuverable and can be adjusted con-
tinuously. It also has directional sensors
close to the bit (6 ft behind) that enable
close control and adjustment of the well
path. The geometry and design of the tool
enable short-radius wells to be drilled
(dogleg severities of up to 15/100 ft),
which is in line with the best available in
the industry today.
The testing and development process
has been a staged progression, from a
simplistic full-scale proof of concept to a
fully functioning RSS prototype that has
undergone significant drill and endur-
ance testing.
The four prototypes have become
more sophisticated over time, with an as-
sociated testing regime commensurate
with their capability. Having a smart and
highly maneuverable drilling tool is not
enough to generate success in the on-
shore drilling market. Testing needs to
ensure that it is also highly reliable and
can endure. JPT
JPT DECEMBER 2015
Hydraulic Percussion Drilling System
Boosts Rate of Penetration, Lowers Cost

D rilling the Severnaya Truba

field in Aktobe, Kazakhstan,
has been costly and time consuming.
In combination with a drilling-fluid-
powered percussion hammer (FPPH),
a fit-for-application polycrystalline-
diamond-compact (PDC) bit with
depth-of-cut (DOC) -control features
was used to minimize the exposure
of the cutting structure and prevent
breakage. The mechanical lifting and
falling action creates a rapid variation
in weight on bit (WOB), allowing the
bits DOC to fluctuate while overcoming
different stresses. These variations,
along with the percussion pulse created
with each stroke, led to increased rates
ofpenetration (ROPs).
Introduction
Drilling with an air hammer is a tech-
nique whereby gases (typically com-
pressed air or nitrogen) are used to op-
erate a pneumatic hammer, to cool the
drill bit, and to lift cuttings out of the
wellbore. Air forced down the drillstring
actuates the percussion tool, which, in
turn, creates an axial percussion force
directed down to a specially designed
drill bit.
The advantages of air drilling are
that it is usually much faster than using
drilling fluid and may eliminate lost-
circulation problems. The disadvantag-
es are the inability to control the influx
of formation fluids into the wellbore
and the destabilization of the borehole
wall in the absence of wellbore pres-
sure typically provided by the mud col-
umn. Air hammers are also limited to a
This article, written by Special Publications Editor Adam Wilson, contains highlights
of paper SPE 172935, Hydraulic Percussion Drilling System With PDC Bit Increases
ROP and Lowers Drilling Costs, by Scott W. Powell, NOV, and Ertai Hu, Greatwall
Drilling Company, prepared for the 2015 SPE Middle East Unconventional Gas
Conference and Exhibition, Muscat, Oman, 2628 January. The paper has not been
peer reviewed.
lower WOB and will stop working if that
weight isexceeded.
An FPPH is the next step in perfor-
mance drilling. Using the same flow
rates and operating WOB of a conven-
tional assembly, the tool offers the ben-
efit of an axial percussion force to facili-
tate the cutting action of the bit. Like an
air hammer, the axial percussion force is
generated near the bit to give the cutting
structure more energy and overcome
the formations compressive strength.
Tool Description
The FPPH consists of a conventional
power section and the adjustable hous-
ing from a motor, which are attached to
a specially designed bearing assembly
where the axial motion is created. The
power section, consisting of a rotor and
stator, supplies the rotation speed and
torque to actuate the FPPH and turn the
bit. Within the bearing assembly, a two-
piece mandrel is used to create the axial
movement in sequence with the exterior
housing movement. This movement, or
stroke length, and the frequency of lifts
can be varied on the basis of the applica-
tion and bit type being used.
The falling action is a function of the
weight applied at the surface, which
reaches the tool and is variable as bore-
hole friction with the drillstring increas-
es. With each cycle (up and down ac-
tion), the WOB at the tool is lifted until
the roller reaches the peak of the slope.
Once the roller loses contact with the
surface, it accelerates downward. As it
falls, the weight, which was being lift-
ed, goes into free fall, creating a drop in
weight that reaches the bit. The down-
ward travel is stopped when the mass
impacts the solid plate below, creating a
downward percussion force.
The percussion force generated by
this impact is transferred directly to the
bit, which remains stationary through-
out each cycle. As weight is increased,
the falling speed is increased, in turn in-
creasing the impact force.
FPPH Theory and Definitions
With a normal drilling system, increas-
ing the DOC would increase the power-
section load, resulting in torque spikes
or even a stall that can stop the rota-
tion of the drill bit. The reaction time
for changing the DOC through added
weight from the surface is too long to
reach the bit, resulting in little ben-
efit to the bits performance. Having
the DOC change through weight fluc-
tuations only inches from the bit can
enhance the cutting efficiency without
causing power-sectionstalls.
The axial movement and weight vari-
ation work with the cutting action of
a PDC bit. A PDC bit uses a shearing
cutting action, wherein the cutter is
scraped across the formation surface to
shear or fail the rock as it slides. How-
ever, most formations do not comprise
uniformly smooth rock, forcing the cut-
ters to overcome different compressive
strengths and failing methods. As hard-
er formations are encountered, the cut-
ter is forced to slow down and build up
energy before it is able to shear.
This slowing is followed by a sudden
increase in speed once the rock fails and
the stored energy is released. This pro-
cess of rapid bit slowing and accelera-
tion is commonly referred to as stick/
slip and is prevalent in some degree with
all fixed-cutter-bit applications. When
stick/slip reaches severe levels, it can
lead to cutter breakage and a shorter
run life.

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 79


Fig. 1Lobe rotor shown in a stator.
By use of an FPPH, this stick/slip is
reduced because of the weight being
oscillated directly behind the bit at a
high frequency, increasing the cutters
reaction time. When the cutter inter-
acts with a formation that requires more
energy to drill, the added energy re-
leased by the axial motion allows the
cutter to overcome the resistance with-
out slowing or building extra torque.
The cutter can shear through the resis-
tant formation while nearly maintain-
ing its original speed, reducing torque
on the power section and providing
consistentperformance.
Technical Papers
The complete SPE technical
papers synopsized in this
issue are available free to
SPE members for 2 months
at www.spe.org/jpt.
Subscriptions
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at 1.972.952.9393 to notify
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80
Stator Contour
Length
Fig. 2Power-section stator.
Drilling-Tool
Theory and Definitions
To power the FPPH tool, a lobe power
section was used (Fig. 1). This system
comprises five stages and is filled with
an elastomer formulated to maximize
poweroutput.
A power section is a power converter
that converts fluid power into mechani-
cal power by use of flow and pressure.
Mechanical power is then used to pro-
vide rotation and torque to the FPPH
component. The power section consists
of a steel rotor within a steel tube filled
with a rubber compound matched to fit
the rotor dimensions.
The steel tube is referred to as a sta-
tor (being stationary) and contains sev-
eral stages, which are measurements
of length from one lobe crest to the
next one, as a full 360 spiral is creat-
ed (Fig.2). The more stages on a power
section, the more pressure it is able to
hold, corresponding to more power and
torque. As fluid is forced into the open
cavity between the rotor and stator, it
applies pressure to the rotor, forcing
it to turn so fluid can continue to pass
down the length of the rotor.
The rotor is connected to the mandrel
within the FPPH tool, and the drill bit
is connected to the opposite end of the
mandrel. The speed of the rotor is di-
rectly proportional to the bit-rotation
speed and will slow as more weight is
applied to the bit, creating more re-
sistance from the formation. Higher-
strength power sections are able to
resist this drop in speed and hold a con-
stant revolution speed as more weight
is applied.
This resistance is tracked by mon-
itoring the hydraulic pressure in the
drillstring, comparing the off-bottom
pressure to on-bottom pressure. High-
er pressure differentials (difference be-
tween on-bottom and off-bottom pres-
Stator Lead
or Stage Length
sure) mean more torque is being applied
to the bit.
Presentation
of Data and Results
The objective of one run was to validate
the performance gains achievable with
the FPPH tool combined with a PDC
bit compared with standard positive-
displacement mud motors. The offset
wells used a combination of three-cone
insert bits and PDC bits to drill the same
interval as the subject well.
The subject run drilled 750 m in 108
drilling hours, for an overall average
ROP of 6.9 m/hr. The entire interval was
finished in one run, taking half the time
of the two offset runs. Drilling time was
reduced from 14 to 7 days, and one bit
replaced two runs on the offsets, also re-
ducing bit cost. The result is substantial
cost savings compared with previously
drilled wells in the area.
Conclusions
The combination of new technologies to
build a complete performance drilling
package has reduced overall well costs
and drilling time by increasing ROP.
Not all wells and formations are cre-
ated alike, which is why drill bits come
in a variety of shapes, sizes, and styles
meant to tackle most known applica-
tions in the world. This new FPPH sys-
tem is the same, with a variety of sizes
and configurations that allow it to be
tailored to a particular application and
bit type.
Current applications for the tool are
geared toward hard-rock solutions be-
cause of the nature of the tools func-
tion and performance drivers. As new
configurations are developed, they will
be paired with fit-for-purpose bit solu-
tions, allowing the system to expand
into even more regions of drilling and
cover a wider range of applications. JPT
JPT DECEMBER 2015
Rotation by Reciprocation
Casing-Landing Technology

W ith the innovation of extended-

reach and directional drilling,
running casing and liner strings has
become increasingly difficult. Not much
has been done to address the challenges,
which include ledges and obstructions, Fig. 17-in. PDC-bit-drillable with the bronze Rhino eccentric bit.
washouts, swelling shale, bridging,
high doglegs, difficult well profiles, Technology Concept Facilitates reaming the walls of the
fill on bottom, and well collapse. To The tool provides rotation at the end of wellbore.
overcome the challenges, a new product the casing string by reciprocating the Agitates the fill and breaks bridges.
line was developed as a way to facilitate casing string rather than by rotating the Reams tight spots caused by swelling
casing operations, especially for long string at surface. It uses a very small shales and other geological issues.
horizontal strings, production strings, amount of hydraulic pressure, provided Navigates ledges and doglegs.
and intermediate casing strings. by the mud pump, to enable the removal Navigates the washed-out sections
of fill by penetrating through it and circu- of the wellbore.
Introduction lating it out. Also, it provides deflection Assists in keeping cuttings
The technology can rotate independently of the casing shoe to bypass ledges. suspended through nonlinear flow,
from the casing when encountering ob- The tool has a fixed helical mandrel decreasing falloff.
structions and hanging. The rotation is connecting to the casing string, so the Allows circulation of fill out of the
performed by reciprocating the casing lower tool body is able to rotate. bottom.
through 3- to 5-ft strokes that cause the Only 21 psi of internal hydraulic pres- Is compatible with liner hangers.
tool shoe to act as a bit and ream. It drills sure is needed to extend the lower tool Is completely PDC-bit drillable
off the obstruction and guides the cas- body along the mandrel into an open in a short time (approximately
ing string through ledges, tight swollen position. By applying this pressure, the 45minutes for a 7-in. tool and
sections, and doglegs, allowing effective mechanism at the lower assembly of the 2.5hours for the 9-in. tool).
removal of fill and debris from below the tool rotates and extends into an open
casing/liner shoe to land at the intended position. By setting weight on the tool, The Tool Product Line
total depth (TD). the lower assembly moves up along the PDC-Bit-Drillable Version. The tool
The technology comprises two main mandrel, causing right-hand rotation on (Fig. 1) comes in a PDC-bit-drillable ver-
components: the tool body, which is the lower assembly by lowering the cas- sion for the surface- and intermediate-
made similar to the casing grade being ing string. casing strings, with a short aluminum
run, and the internal mechanism, which The tool is effectively torque neutral, mandrel to reduce drillout time. The in-
is made from industrial-grade aluminum causing no torsional torque transmitted ternals are made from industrial-grade
alloy for the mandrels and bronze com- up the casing string. aluminum alloy and bronze components,
ponents for the bit, both of which lend both of which lend strength and durabil-
strength and durability to the tool while Benefits of the Technology ity to the tool while facilitating smooth
facilitating a smooth clean drillout with The tool design clean drillouts without damage to the
a standard polycrystalline-diamond- Provides rotation without rotating PDC drillout bit.
compact (PDC) bit. the casing string. The operator does not need to
make a special bit trip for drilling out
the tool. The drilling bottomhole as-
This article, written by Special Publications Editor Adam Wilson, contains highlights
sembly will be used for that, and drill-
of paper SPE 172144, Rotation by Reciprocation Casing-Landing Technology,
ing will continue into the formation
by R. Gosselin and T. Montgomery, Longhorn Casing Tools; A. Muriby, SPE, and after the float equipment and tool are
Moataz Yussef, Wildcat Oilfield Services; and S. Karrani and A. Khamis, AbuDhabi drilled out.
Marine Operating Company, prepared for the 2014 Abu Dhabi International
Petroleum Exhibition and Conference, Abu Dhabi, 1013 November. The paper has PDC-Bit-Drillable Short Version. A
not been peerreviewed. short version of the basic tool is avail-

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 81


Fig. 27-in. tool with the aluminum eccentric bit.
Fig. 34-in. nondrillable steel basic tool with a bull-nose-profile bit.
Fig. 45-in. nondrillable steel auto-set tool.
Fig. 52-in. wellbore-cleanout tool.
able (Fig. 2) to address specific applica-
tions and deal with ledges and doglegs
in wells that require cost-effective solu-
tions. This version is PDC-bit-drillable
and uses a 1-ft stroke to provide three-
quarters of a revolution, which is enough
to orient an eccentric bit away from the
ledge or obstruction to find the open
hole and guide the casing.
Nondrillable Steel Version. The non-
drillable version (Fig. 3) was designed
to provide a mechanical solution to ad-
dress obstacles that interfere with get-
ting the production-casing string to
bottom. The tool is designed to pro-
vide maximum revolutions to facilitate
reaming, agitating of fill and debris,
and deflection off ledges, obstructions,
andwashouts.
Nondrillable Auto-Set Steel Version.
This version (Fig. 4) was developed to
assist in running casing and liners in
applications where hydraulic pressure
cannot be induced to the bit or where
circulation through the casing is impos-
sible. With a high-tensile-spring design,
82
is equipped with stabilizers and a cut-
the bit seeks out open hole through rota-
sist wear and is tungsten carbide clus-
the tool is reset to the open position
by reducing weight on bit rather than
with hydraulic pressure. The tool can
be sealed to prevent the production of
sand, cuttings, and paraffin through it
during the run and during production.
Wellbore-Cleanout Tool. The cleanout
tool (Fig. 5) features a design similar
to that of the basic tool but is designed
specifically to clean out produced sands
and paraffin from producing wells. It
can be equipped to clean hole from 4-
to 9-in. inner diameter. When used on
a service rig, reciprocation of the tubing
along with pump pressure actuates the
tool, providing a mechanical solution to
clean out production-hampering debris.
When used with coiled tubing, the tool
uses the increased hydraulic pressure
to auger its way through the obstruc-
tion and the coil is run in to close and
reset the tool. This technique is used to
minimizereciprocation.
Drillable Casing Bits
Bronze Casing-Pilot Bit. This tool is
a PDC-bit-drillable bit made complete-
ly out of bronze, with tungsten carbide
cutting faces and tungsten carbide but-
tons to minimize the wear on the bit.
With a 2-in.2 flow area, it includes a
locking mechanism to prevent the bits
rotation when drilling it out. The tool
was designed to be the best all-around
bit, suitable for reaming and bridge re-
moval regardless of geology. The pro-
file of the tool is a long taper, allow-
ing for deflection off ledges, washouts,
anddoglegs.
Bronze Eccentric Bit. This eccentric
bit (Fig. 1) is a heavy-duty bronze drill-
able bit with a long eccentric profile. It
ting face, and it provides 360 reaming
capability, with tungsten carbide cutting
faces and tungsten carbide buttons to
resist wear. The long eccentric profile of
tion provided by the basic tool.
Bronze Bridge-Breaker Bit. This tool
is all-bronze construction, which makes
it completely drillable, and is outfitted
with tungsten carbide buttons to re-
tered to increase its cutting and agita-
tion power. Designed primarily for coal
seams and swelling shales, the outer
row of cutters is designed to cut the ex-
posed shales and coal into large pieces,
which are then broken down further by
a row of inside cutters for easy removal
by circulation.
Bull-Nose-Profile Bit. This tool (Fig.3)
was designed with a rounded bull-nose
profile. The bit has four stabilizers
tipped with tungsten carbide, which de-
flect off ledges, washouts, and doglegs
and facilitate reaming and agitation.
The bit is available in steel for nondrill-
able applications.
Aluminum Eccentric Bit. This tool
has an eccentric nose profile to facili-
tate sliding (Fig. 2). It is made of alu-
minum composite, so it is completely
PDC-bit-drillable. The eccentric bit is a
cost-effective solution for situations in-
volving extreme washouts, ledges, and
doglegs. Through rotation, the long ec-
centric nose of the bit is aligned toward
the open hole, acting as a guide to find
the open hole. JPT
JPT DECEMBER 2015
TECHNOLOGY FOCUS

Water Management
Syed A. Ali, SPE, Technical Adviser, Schlumberger

Horizontal drilling followed by multistage The need for such vast
fracturing is the most prevalent mode
of hydrocarbon extraction from shales.
amounts of fresh water
Hydraulic fracturing of a well encompass- in hydraulic fracturing
es, on average, approximately 30 fractur- significantly affects
ing stages, with each stage using approxi-
mately 3,800 bbl of fresh water, equat- water availability and
ing to approximately 114,000bbl for each sourcing and the cost and
well. The need for such vast amounts of
fresh water in hydraulic fracturing signifi- logistics of accessing and
cantly affects water availability and sourc- trucking the water to the
ing and the cost and logistics of accessing
wellsite. ...Thus, in the
and trucking the water to the wellsite. Fur-
thermore, regulations designed to protect interest of conservation and
communities and the environment from sustainability, it is highly
potential sources of contamination are
becoming increasingly stringent. desirable to maximize
Approximately 1030% of the fresh any opportunity to reuse
water injected into a well during frac-
turing treatments returns to the surface
the produced water for
along with various amounts of formation subsequent fracturing
water, henceforth referred to as produced treatments.
water. Thus, in the interest of conserva-
tion and sustainability, it is highly desir-
able to maximize any opportunity to reuse ate the industrys dependence on fresh
the produced water for subsequent frac- water but also lowers the overall cost of
turing treatments. the fracturing operations. Conventional
Produced water usually contains resid- fracturing-fluid systems require fairly
ual hydrocarbon; high levels of total dis- low TDS to achieve stable rheology, so
solved solids (TDS), including sodium, produced water requires extensive treat-
calcium, magnesium, barium, and other ment before it can be used for fracturing.
salts; suspended solids; and residual There have been attempts to develop
production chemicals. Reclaiming pro- fluids that can be prepared with produced
duced water as the base fluid for hydrau- waters that contain a limited amount of
lic fracturing not only helps to allevi- TDS, typically less than 30,000 ppm.
Syed A. Ali, SPE, is a technical adviser with Schlumberger.
Previously, he was a Chevron Fellow with Chevron Energy
Technology Company. Ali received the 2012 SPE Distinguished
Service Award and the 2006 SPE Production and Operations
Award. He holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees. Ali served as executive
editor of SPE Production & Operations and currently serves on
several SPE committees, including the JPT Editorial Committee,
the Formation Evaluation Award Committee, and the Well
Completions Subcommittee.
However, several operating areas, includ-
ing the Haynesville, Marcellus, and Bak-
ken shales and west Texas areas, have
produced waters with much higher salin-
ity (TDS concentrations greater than
150,000 ppm).
An ideal solution would be to reuse
the high-TDS produced water in subse-
quent fracturing treatments with mini-
mal filtration to remove the suspended
solids. In response, a growing group of
chemical suppliers, researchers, and ser-
vice companies are on a mission to devel-
op fracturing fluids using high-TDS pro-
duced water as a base fluid that provides
a stable rheology.
The papers featured this month deal
with the formulation of stable fractur-
ing fluid from high-TDS produced water.
I urge you to look at OnePetro, the SPE
online library, and download papers.
You will find updates on best practices,
case studies, new fluid formulations, and
much more. JPT
Recommended additional reading
at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org.
IPTC 18142 Slickwater Chemistry
Concerns and Field Water Management
inTight Gas by David Langille, Shell Canada,
et al.
SPE 173371 Chemical Compatibility
of Mixing Utica and Marcellus
ProducedWaters: Not All Waters
Are Created EqualA Case Study
by F.B. Woodward, Shell Exploration
& Production, et al.
SPE 173324 The Freshwater Neutral
Challenge: The Need for Protection,
Reduction, Innovation, and Conservation
by R. Greaves, Southwestern Energy, et al.
SPE 173372 Overcoming Obstacles
for Produced Water in Bakken Well
Stimulations by Darren D. Schmidt,
Statoil,et al.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 83

 First Reuse of 100% Produced Water
in Hybrid Treatments With Gelling Agents

T his paper reports the completion

of a two-lateral well in the
Williston basin where produced
anced out in most cases by various cost
issues around water sourcing.
In contrast, economical and oper-
injection of PW, it is not efficient because
it requires fresh water and introduces in-
herent variability in water quality during
water (PW), filtered but otherwise ationally simple solutions that deliver fracturing operations because the blend-
untreated, was used throughout the crosslinked gels reliably have been more ing levels fluctuate and the quality of
slickwater and crosslinked components difficult to develop, largely because the input water changes.
of approximately 60 hydraulic- chemistry of crosslinked gels is much There are a few documented cases re-
fracturing stages. Proppant was more complicated. The industrys pre- porting 100% PW reuse that employ
placed successfullyin all perforated ferred system, guar crosslinked by boron crosslinked carboxymethyl hydroxy-
zones byuse of a hybrid design that at high pH, has several shortcomings in propyl guar (CMHPG), a costly deriva-
used 7million gal of water (of which highly saline PW, and most service com- tive of guar. These have emerged from
2.2million gal was crosslinked). panies advertise that water beyond 4 to water-stressed areas and from areas
This paper will concentrate on the 8% total dissolved solids (TDS) is highly where fresh water is abundant. In all cases,
development and implementation of undesirable in this system. Boron, cal- the salinity was at least 200,000 ppm
ametal-crosslinked fracturing fluid cium, and magnesium are specific ions TDS. Because these systems depend on a
thatshowed excellentstability. that pose problems. Boron is common polymer that is roughly twice the cost of
in PW, and the water used in this study guar itself, they do not necessarily rep-
Introduction had roughly three times the boron con- resent a true path to minimum comple-
The demand for an economical ap- centration that would be expected in a tion cost even though they are efficient
proach to reuse water from oilfield op- quality borate-crosslinked gel suitable in terms of PW reuse (no freshwater di-
erationsnamely produced, flowback, for use in the same project. The presence lution is required). Uptake by the market
and nonpotable sourcesis not a new of unpredictable and potentially variable appears to have been sluggish, and this
concept. In slickwater fracturing, reuse amounts of adventitious crosslinker in has been attributed variously to concerns
of PW is a solved problem, thanks to the mix water is a major challenge to op- over cost or concerns over the risks in-
the ready availability of synthetic fric- erational success. Calcium and magne- herent in pumping shear-sensitive fluids
tion reducers that are efficient even in sium ions have strong negative effects in long horizontals. There is clearly an
heavy and unpredictable natural brines. on the quality and durability of borate- opportunity for a system that can use
Here, the physical chemistry of the sys- crosslinked guar gels. The typical re- 100% untreated PW as mix water with-
tem (a soluble polymer reducing pipe sponse has been to add stabilizers or out introducing either treatment costs
friction) is fairly straightforward and chelants specific to hardness ions or to or increased costs of chemical additives.
the key innovations driving successful treat the water to remove hardness. Most
friction reduction in PW were easy to water treatments are costly and capi- Fluid Development
identify and import from polymer sci- tal intensive, and many generate waste and Initial Laboratory Testing
ence once the failure mechanisms for the streams. These increased costs can chal- Land-based fracturing in the US and
parent polyacrylamides in PW were un- lenge operators seeking to extract value Canada had been focused on borate-
derstood. Although the synthetic poly- from PW who want crosslinked gels. An- crosslinked-guar fracturing fluids even
mers used in PW are derived from more- other approach is to dilute PW on the fly before the boom in horizontal, multi-
costly feedstocks than the parent poly- with fresh water to a salinity level that stage wells. Such fluids have a predictable
acrylamide/polyacrylate copolymers, the borate-crosslinked guar can accommo- reliability profile as long as water qual-
completion-cost increase is easily bal- date. Although this practice negates re- ity is consistent and the concentrations
of divalent cations and boron do not ex-
ceed certain levels. For proper stability
This article, written by Special Publications Editor Adam Wilson, contains highlights
at reservoir conditions, borate fluids are
of paper SPE 173783, First 100% Reuse of Bakken Produced Water in Hybrid formulated at high pH. Typical Bakken
Treatments Using Inexpensive Polysaccharide Gelling Agents, by Blake McMahon, downhole conditions require fluid pH to
SPE, Bruce MacKay, SPE, and Andrey Mirakyan, SPE, Schlumberger, prepared for be above 10. While not a major concern
the 2015 SPE International Symposium on Oilfield Chemistry, The Woodlands, Texas, for fluids blended in fresh water, a pH
USA, 1315 April. The paper has not been peer reviewed. above 10 results in significant precipita-

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

84 JPT DECEMBER 2015

WATER RECYCLING
CUSTOMIZED WATER TREATMENT FOR THE OILFIELD
Cudd Energy Services (CES) provides custom-designed water treatment
technologies to address water recycling requirements in oil and gas fields. This
innovative technology, combined with a configurable, site-specific treatment
process generates recycled water that is compatible with todays engineered
fracturing fluid technologies. Our customized treatment features OxiFlo Oxidizer,
a selective oxidant that efficiently destroys sulfidic compounds, including iron
sulfide and hydrogen sulfide, as well as residual polymers in the water. CES
water recycling solutions optimize water reuse without jeopardizing the quality
of your fracturing fluids and the productivity of your reservoir.

To learn more, visit us at www.cudd.com.

 Sample Temperature (F)
250
Temperature (F) / Shear Rate (1/second)
Shear Rate (1/second) Viscosity (cp) Another field trial was performed in
1,000
which two 30-stage horizontal wells were
900 completed with a hybrid design. Treat-

ing pressures were consistent with the

200 800 proof-of-concept trial, and a steady de-
700
cline in treating pressure was observed
in all cases as proppant concentration

Viscosity (cp)
150 600 increased. On the 20,000-ft-measured-
500 depth well, the pipe time was 17 min-
utes, implying that the fluid would be ex-
100 400 posed to shear for a significant amount
300 of time. Stages at the toe of the well
were treated as expected, with no pres-
50 200 sure spikes leading to incomplete prop-
100
pant placement. This may imply that the
fluid is less sensitive to shear than would
0 0 beexpected.
0:00:00 0:10:00 0:20:00 0:30:00 0:40:00 0:50:00 1:00:00 1:10:00 1:20:00 1:30:00 1:40:00
The two wells treated had offset wells
Elasped Time (hh:mm:ss)
in close proximity for comparison. The
Fig. 1Borate-crosslinked guar in 100% Bakken PW. wells treated with PW showed equivalent
or better production compared with the
tion of calcium and magnesium hydrox- thermodynamic equilibrium with the for- offsets, despite being choked back.
ide scales if the fluid is formulated in PW, mation. In principle, pumping fluid made
even if it is diluted. with 100% produced connate water back Conclusions
An example of a borate-crosslinked into the stratum that produced it should This paper presents a crosslinked
fluid formulated with 100% Three Forks not result in scaling because reinjection fracturing fluid that can be
PW is shown in Fig. 1. A fluid was pro- is the reverse of the pressure/volume/ formulated to give satisfactory
duced using adventitious boron in the temperature transition of production. rheological performance in
water by carefully adjusting pH to avoid This supposition was checked using a laboratory testing in 100%
syneresis and taking into account how scale-modeling tool and was confirmed untreated Bakken PW of salinity
fluid properties would change with tem- indirectly by satisfactory production re- from 24 to 32% TDS.
perature. Achieving fluid reliability in sults vs. offset wells. The water used in The fluid uses standard oilfield-
this manner is extremely difficult, and this study had reached equilibrium with chemical approaches to
the risk of service-quality issues on lo- the formation from which it was subse- crosslinking, buffering, breaking,
cation would be unacceptably high. quently produced. and pH control.
Not only is implementing a borate sys- The fluid is based on a simple
tem difficult in water such as this, large Field Trials and widely used polysaccharide
amounts of insoluble scale is formed in Initial testing was performed on the gelling agent that is inexpensive
the process. last three stages of two wells using Bak- vs. previous successes in similar
An alternative approach involves ken PW, with 1-m sock filtration only, conditions.
the use of a metallic crosslinker and a as a proof of concept and a demonstra- The fluid can be implemented
metal-crosslinkable gelling agent to pro- tion of service delivery. Despite chang- with high reliability in multistage
duce fluid stable at bottomhole condi- es in mix-water quality throughout the fracturing, using standard
tions and pH below 9 to avoid potential job, there were no fluid-related service- fracturing equipment.
scaling issues. In the first step, gelling quality incidents and all proppant was Observed treating pressures
agent is hydrated in 100% PW at a suit- placed as per design. Post-job treat- indicate that the new fluid offers
able pH to promote fast hydration. In the ing pressure was compared with the some advantages in near-wellbore
second step, a Group IV metal crosslinker borate-based fluid that had been used on proppant transport.
is added and pH is adjusted to achieve the previous stages. Treating pressure The system is highly tolerant of
optimum crosslinking rate. The result- showed a consistent decline as expected fluctuations in water quality during
ing fluid is stable at bottomhole-static- when proppant concentration was in- a stage.
temperature conditions and does not creased compared with the borate-based A special work flow executed in
contain any hydroxide or carbonate fluid, which showed increases in pressure advance in the laboratory ensures
scales that are observed in high-pH bo- as proppant reached the perforations. reliable delivery at the wellsite.
rate fluids in the same mix water. It can also be said that some bridging, Production in the Bakken and Three
One of the potential benefits of this either in the fracture or at the perfora- Forks completions is equivalent or
practice of reusing PW is that the connate tions, was observed using the borate- superior to that of offset wells of
water produced from the well has reached crosslinked fluid. similar design. JPT

86 JPT DECEMBER 2015

Permian Basin Fracturing Systems
Using Produced Water

I n areas where freshwater costs and

produced-water-disposal costs are
problematic, operators and service
6,000,000
4.8 million
5,000,000
companies have shown the desire to
use produced and flowback water in 4,000,000

Gallons
field operations to enhance overall 3.2 million
completions economics. This paper 3,000,000
details the experience of using new
stabilized crosslinked-fracturing-fluid 2,000,000
systems in the Permian Basin using
borated produced water. The new 0.7 million
1,000,000 0.5 million
fracturing-fluid systems are designed
to delay the crosslinking time when -
needed, using the boron already present Horizontal Gas Horizontal Oil Vertical Gas Vertical Oil
in the water. Fig. 1Average water use per well by type of production.

Introduction
In the US, nearly half of the wells hydrau- up to 1 million B/D of water over the next deep-zone fracturing at moderate ap-
lically fractured since 2011 were in re- 10 years. This goes a long way toward se- plied pressures. Using produced water
gions with high or extremely high water curing water sources that are not fresh, for crosslinked-gel-based hydraulic frac-
stress and more than 55% were in areas more than 75% over the next several turing not only can expand the beneficial
experiencing drought. In Colorado and years. The Texas Railroad Commission, use of produced water in the oil and gas
California, 97 and 96% of the wells, re- the states oil and gas regulator, reported industry but also may mitigate the effect
spectively, were in regions with high a current collective water-recycling ca- on the freshwater supply.
or extremely high water stress. In New pacity of 1.5 million B/D. Proper rheological characteristics of
Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, the major- Hydraulic fracturing may use as little fracturing fluids are crucial to the success
ity of wells were in high- or extremely- as 500,000 gal of water in a convention- of the stimulation treatment. A signifi-
high-water-stress regions. In Texas, al vertical-well treatment, but multiple- cant amount of produced water with total
which currently has the highest concen- interval fracturing in horizontal wells dissolved solids between 30 000 and
tration of hydraulic-fracturing activity in may require 4 million to 6 million 120 000 mg/L, boron content as high as
the US, more than half of the wells exam- gal/well. Fig. 1 shows the average use per 100 mg/L, and hardness levels below and
ined (52%) were in high- or extremely- well by type of production. Slickwater- above 2000 mg/L is used as base fluid
high-water-stress regions. The World fracturing systems use inertial force to in crosslinked-fracturing-fluid systems.
Resources Institute defines high water minimize the settling of proppants and, Stable rheological profiles are reported
stress as more than 80% of available therefore, are not suitable for deep-zone with use of 100% produced water, saving
surface and groundwater being allocat- fracturing because of the excessive ap- more than 25 million gal of fresh water in
ed for municipal, industrial, and agricul- plied pressure required at the surface. the completion of more than 400 stages
tural uses. Crosslinked-gel systems, on the other with crosslinked-gel systems in the Wolf-
In the Permian Basin of west Texas, hand, with high apparent viscosities, can camp shale.
one oil company already expects to use carry a wide range of sand loading for
Methods and Results
Hydration Curve of Linear-Gel System
This article, written by Special Publications Editor Adam Wilson, contains highlights
and Rheological Profile of Crosslinked
of paper SPE 172811, Permian Fracturing Systems Using Produced Water, by Fracturing Fluid at Steady Shear. Hy-
Sarkis Kakadjian, SPE, Joseph Thompson, SPE, Robert Torres, Antonio Pontifes, dration tests of guar and guar derivatives
Amanda Rodriguez, and Yahia Ait Hamlat, Trican Well Service, prepared for were monitored by recording the chang-
the 2015 SPE Middle East Oil and Gas Show and Conference, Manama, Bahrain, es in the viscosity of the linear-gel sys-
811March. The paper has not been peer reviewed. tems. This was performed by mixing the

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 87

 polymer in produced water at 2,500 rev/ Size Distribution of the Broken
min. The pH of the produced water was Crosslinked-Gel Systems in Pro-
SI METRIC adjusted to the desired value using a buf- duced Water. Guar/borate and CMHPG/
CONVERSION FACTORS fer solution; then, the proper amount of zirconate systems were broken using
The list below includes SImetric guar or derivative was added to the solu- oxidative and enzymatic breakers, re-
conversion factors for common
tion for hydration. spectively. The crosslinked gels were
engineering units.
In order to determine the rheologi- placed inside aging cells, pressurized
acre 4.046 873 E 03 m2
cal profile of the crosslinked-gel sys- to 300 psi, and left overnight inside
tem, the linear gel was first mixed with an oven heated to 140F. The broken
acre 4.046 873 E 01 ha
a gel stabilizer followed by the addi- gels were cooled to room temperature
acre-ft 1.233 489 E 03 m3
tion of a breaker and a crosslinker. The to be analyzed for size-distribution and
ampere-hr 3.6* E 03 C
apparent viscosity was measured at a viscositymeasurements.
1.0* E 01 nm constant shear rate (40 or 100 s1, as a Broken CMHPG/zirconate systems
API 141.5/(131.5 API) g/cm3 function of time). Zirconate-crosslinked exhibited much smaller polymer frag-
atm 1.013 250* E 05 Pa carboxymethyl hydroxypropyl guar ments than broken guar/borates at the
bar 1.0* E 05 Pa (CMHPG) and borate-crosslinked guar microscopic scale and at the macroscopic
bbl 1.589 873 E 01 m3 gels, with and without boron scavengers, scale. CMHPG broken gels showed little
Btu 1.055 056 E 00 kJ wereformulated. residue compared with the guar broken
Ci 3.7* E 10 Bq The rheological effects of ionic gels. The size distribution of the broken
cp 1.0* E 03 Pa s strength and hardness of the water were guar/borate-crosslinked system shows
cycles/sec 1.0* E 00 Hz
evaluated. The following benchmarks of polydisperse behavior, while CMHPG/
the crosslinked gel were used as qualifi- zirconate broken polymer fragments
dyne 1.0* E 02 mN
ers of proper rheological characteristics weremonodisperse.
eV 1.602 19 E 19 J
for hydraulic fracturing:
ft 3.048* E 01 m
Maximum achievable apparent Field Testing. More than 400 fractur-
ft2 9.290 304* E 02 m2 viscosity1,500 cp at 40 s1 shear ing stages were pumped using 100%
ft3 2.831 685 E 02 m3 rate or 600 cp at 100 s1 shear rate untreated Wolfcamp produced water.
F (F 32)/1.8 C Sustainable sand-carrying Estimated bottomhole static tempera-
F (F 459.67)/1.8 K viscositygreater than 200 cp at ture was 140160F, with pump rates
gal (U.S. liq) 3.785 412 E 03 m3 40 s1 shear rate or greater than up to 35 bbl/min. Polymer loadings of
hp 7.460 43 E 01 kW 100cp at 100 s1 shear rate for more crosslinked-gel systems varied between
hp-hr 2.684 520 E 00 MJ than 1 hour 20 and 25 lbm/1,000 gal. The total vol-
in. 2.54* E 00 cm Because the ionic composition of pro- ume of produced water used throughout
in.2 6.451 6* E 00 cm2
duced water can vary significantly from all stages exceeded 25 million gal.
well to well, the first goal of the study
in.3 1.638 706 E 01 cm3
was to optimize and examine the effect Conclusions
kip 4.448 222 E 03 N
of ionic strength on the rheological per- New generations of guar- and
knot 5.144 444 E 01 m/s
formance of the crosslinked gels. Pro- CMHPG-based crosslinked
ksi 6.894 757 E 03 kPa duced water has a high concentration of fracturing fluids, formulated
kW-hr 3.6* E 06 J dissolved salts, which means it is not a with100% untreated produced
lbf 4.448 222 E 00 N good solvent for guar and guar deriva- water, enabled significant
lbm 4.535 924 E 01 kg tives unless different grades of polymer conservation of freshwater
mL 1.0* E 00 cm3 are screened and the optimum pH is aquifers, recycling produced and
mho 1.0* E 00 S found. Proper hydration of guar and guar flowback water and reducing
mile 1.609 344* E 00 km derivatives is also crucial for achieving disposal costs. All 15- to
oz (U.S. fl) 2.957 353 E 01 cm3 the desirable rheological characteristics. 25-lbm/1,000-gal crosslinked gels
psi 6.894 757 E 00 kPa
Adding oxidative breaker to a exhibited viscosities exceeding
25-lbm/1,000-gal guar/borate gel sys- 200cp at 40 s1 or 100 cp at
psi2 4.753 8 E 01 kPa2
tem, prepared using unfiltered/untreat- 100s1 for at least 60 minutes.
sq mile 2.589 988 E 00 km2
ed produced water, induces a decrease of This innovative fracturing-fluid
stokes 1.0* E 04 m2/s
the viscosity in one sample. In all tested approach saved more than 25
ton 9.071 847 E 01 Mg conditions for a second sample, the vis- million gal of fresh water during
ton (metric) 1.0* E 00 Mg cosity of the crosslinked-gel system was more than 400 fracturing stages in
tonf 8.896 444 E 03 N higher than 200 cp after 60 minutes of the Wolfcamp shale.
tonne 1.0* E 00 Mg evaluation. Adding different levels of en- Broken crosslinked-CMHPG gels
zyme breaker in the second sample of exhibited much smaller polymer
*Conversion factor is exact. unfiltered/untreated produced water in- fragments than broken borate-
duced a further decrease of the viscosity. crosslinked-guar gels. JPT

88 JPT DECEMBER 2015

Water Management: Lessons Learned and
Considerations for a Shale Play in Argentina

Water Sources and Stimulation

R ecently, exploration and
development of shale plays in
Argentina, such as the Vaca Muerta,
have begun. To achieve commercial
production, this type of reservoir must
be stimulated by hydraulic fracturing
using large volumes of water. This paper
discusses aspects of water logistics
necessary during the well-completion
phase, fracture-treatment designs
applied in Vaca Muerta, and laboratory
studies performed on flowback and
produced water to help evaluate the
potential for water reuse.
Given the economic potential of the Vaca
Muerta play, the focus lies on this res-
ervoir. The primary sources of water in
the Neuqun basin used to develop these
hydrocarbon resources are rivers (Neu-
qun, Limay, and Colorado), lakes, res-
ervoirs (Cerro Colorado and Pellegrini),
or groundwater sources, such as wells
with low salinity. These types of wells for
water supply need a permit from the reg-
ulatory authority, and produced water
is not suitable for human consumption
orfarming.

Introduction Types of Systems. The following systems

Well stimulation using hydraulic fractur- used fresh water and contained chemical
ing has been used widely for producing additives to perform variousfunctions:
oil and gas reservoirs in Argentina since SWContained a friction reducer
Fig. 1Map of five hydrocarbon-
the 1960s. This stimulation technique and friction-reducer breaker producing basins in Argentina.
has been applied in the five hydrocarbon- LGContained a gelling agent,
producing basins shown in Fig. 1, as well buffer, and breaker was performed for six fields, A, B, C, D,
as in a variety of formations and types of XLConsisted of a buffer, gelling E, and F. Thirteen wells and more than
reservoirs, such as conventional, tight, agent, crosslinker, and breaker 65 hydraulic fractures were analyzed. In
and, more recently, shale. Additionally, each of the fluid systems general, average water volume per stage
The majority of shale exploration and also typically contained a biocide, clay varied according to the fluid reservoir;
development has been in the Vaca Muer- inhibitors, and surfactant additives. for oil wells, the average water volume
ta formation, but work has also been as- was 1300 m3; it was 1850 m3 for wet-
sessed in other formations, such as Los Types of Treatment. The most com- gas and 2180 m3 for gas wells. The frac-
Molles, Cacheuta, D-129, and Agrio. Ex- mon hydraulic-fracturing treatments turing treatments were primarily hybrid
perience gained related to water man- performed in different plays in Argen- SW/XL, although some cases used
agement in these shale plays during tina were hybrid fracturing designs. The SW/LG/XL. LG was commonly used as a
the completion of more than 40 wells greatest volumes of water by stage cor- contingency in the transition from SW to
(more than 200 hydraulic fractures) by respond to reservoirs of gas and wet XL. Normally, the completion of a Vaca
different operators is presented in the gas in hybrid treatment designs for Muerta well involved a total water vol-
paper. Furthermore, laboratory studies both SW/LG (Los Molles) and SW/LG/XL ume of approximately 6500 m3 for ver-
were conducted on treated and untreat- (VacaMuerta). tical wells and approximately 14 500 m3
ed flowback water, and assessment of its A statistical analysis regarding the for horizontal wells.
use as fracturing-fluid water is presented. type of hydraulic fracture in Vaca Muerta
Logistics
During the past 5 years, there has been
This article, written by Special Publications Editor Adam Wilson, contains highlights
substantial progress related to water
of paper SPE 174118, Water Management: What We Have Learned and What We
management and logistics for sustain-
Need To Consider for Developing a Shale Play in Argentina, by J.C. Bonapace, SPE, able development of Argentinas shale
Halliburton, and F.G. Alric, A. Angeloni, and L. Zangari, Total E&P, prepared plays. A variety of water-storage systems
for the 2015 SPE Latin American and Caribbean Health, Safety, Environment, and and methods for transferring water have
Sustainability Conference, Bogot, Colombia, 78 July. The paper has not been been used in the Neuqun basin, primar-
peerreviewed. ily in the Vaca Muerta.

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

JPT DECEMBER 2015 89

 Currently, the most common storage
systems used are mobile fracture tanks
and circular tanks. Pit usage is restricted
for environmental reasons.
First Vertical Well
The completion of the first well in Vaca
Muerta consisted of four hydraulic-
fracture stages, requiring of 7600 m3 of
water. Alternatives were evaluated for
the logistics and water management, and
it was decided to install a transfer system
through pipes and a water-storage loca-
tion close to the well to be stimulated.
A water well (groundwater with low
salinity) in the same field was used for
source water. A circular tank for water
storage was located in the vicinity. The
operator performed the laying of 4-in.
pipe from the water well to the water-
storage location, where two circular
tanks were installed.
Vertical and Horizontal Well
The second vertical well in Vaca Muer-
ta consisted of four hydraulic-fracture
stages, requiring 8000 m3 of water. For
the stimulation of this well, it was de-
cided to drill a new water well close
to the wellsite and apply the same
water-managementstrategy.
The first horizontal-well completion
consisted of six fracture stages, consum-
ing 13 000 m3 of water. Part of the in-
frastructure built for the vertical well
was used for the horizontal well. Be-
cause of the amount of water needed, a
new circular tank with greater capacity
wasrequired.
Use and Reuse of Flowback,
Produced, and Treated Water
Laboratory studies evaluated differ-
ent alternatives for the use of nontradi-
tional waters as fracturing fluids. The
testsincluded
Detailed water (physical/chemical)
analysis
Clay-swelling and -inhibition testing
Evaluation and development of XL
fluids proppant-transport capacity
Damage by gel residue and total
suspended solids (TSS)
Physical/Chemical Analysis. Flowback
and produced water have similar char-
acteristics, which differentiate them
from fresh water. In general, these wa-
90
ters have higher values of specific grav-
ity, lower pH values, higher levels of
total dissolved solids (TDS) and TSS,
and significant Ca, Mg, Na, K, Fe, B, and
Baconcentrations.
Action as Clay Inhibitor. During the ex-
ploration phase of the Vaca Muerta, a
routine capillary-suction-time test was
performed for each well in a new field;
the intention was to understand the de-
gree of water sensitivity and select the
best clay stabilizer and concentration.
The following clay stabilizers have
been tested and used in these fields:
Quaternary ammonium salt (liquid)
Inorganic salt, KCl (solid)
New ultralow-molecular-weight
cationic organic polymer recently
applied to replace the quaternary
ammonium salts
Fracturing Fluid. Referring to the XL
fluid tests performed, the base fluid used
was fresh water and the system used
guar/borate. The pumping of large vol-
umes of SW or linear gel before an XL gel
has a cooling effect, which makes the XL
systems subject to background tempera-
tures of approximately 120F and spacing
of approximately 30 to 45 minutes.
Blend of Water (Flowback Untreated).
The first test performed used the nor-
mal fracturing fluid (guar/borate) with a
mixture of waters. The results were not
satisfactory because of gel-hydration and
-crosslinking problems that resulted in
unstable fluids at surface and bottomhole
conditions. Moreover, increasing the pH
of the system generated filaments, floc-
culants, and precipitates, although bo-
rate systems usually work in high pH.
Treated Water (Flowback). The previ-
ously obtained results led to the decision
to evaluate the fluid with 100% treated
flowback water. Slight changes in pH ad-
justment and concentration of the cross-
linker were made to the fluid.
A reduced viscosity profile was ob-
served between the fluids formulated
with blends of water and those formu-
lated with 100% treated flowback water.
Proppant-Transport Capacity. Two
types of tests were conducted to ana-
lyze transport capacity. The first was
a conditional static (settling) test, and
the second was under dynamic condi-
tions with a slurry viscometer. The set-
tling test revealed that, overall, the guar/
borate system currently used in opera-
tions in the Vaca Muerta lost its carrying
capacity after the first 2 hours. The slurry-
viscometer test indicated that low-
polymer fluid formulations using 100%
nontraditional treated water demon-
strated good proppant-transport capac-
ity, despite having low viscosity values.
Conclusions
In general, hybrid fracturing-treatment
designs dominate the fluid types used
in Argentinas shale plays. The water-
storage systems that have been primarily
used are mobile fracturing storage and
circular tanks, which are usually at the
wellsite being stimulated. Most water is
delivered by transport trucks. An inte-
grated water-management plan was de-
veloped to support well completions in
Vaca Muerta using sources of water close
to the wellsite, pipeline transfer sys-
tems, and a storage system. For a large-
scale development, an integrated water-
management plan must be implement-
ed, taking into account rivers, lakes,
water wells, and synergies with other
regionaloperators.
Nontraditional water sources ana-
lyzed (flowback/produced) for the Vaca
Muerta revealed substantial TDS and TSS
and significant Ca, Mg, Na, K, Fe, and B
concentrations. Treating such waters re-
sults in important reductions of TSS and
Fecontent.
The use of these waters in fracture
treatments indicated that there is no
need to use additional clay stabilizers.
A new fracturing fluid, with low poly-
mer loading and low pH, was devel-
oped that can be formulated with these
waters. This system presents the ad-
vantages of working in a range of pH
in which precipitates do not gener-
ate reduced conductivity in the frac-
ture pack. It generates a good carrying
capacity, as seen by settling tests and
slurry-viscometertesting.
Treatment and reuse of nontradi-
tional water for future fracturing treat-
ments greatly mitigate the issue of fresh-
water requirements for shale wells and
reducevolumes to be injected in dispos-
alwells. JPT
JPT DECEMBER 2015
SPE NEWS
Industry Conditions Drive Reduction
in SPE Staff
SPE has reduced its global staff by 12%
in response to current industry condi-
tions. This is the first time in its 58-year
history that SPE has had to make an
economic-based layoff. CEO and Exec-
utive Vice President Mark Rubin said,
SPE remains focused on providing
excellent service to our members. In
deciding how to make staff reductions,
SPE Honors Peer Reviewers
SPE created the A Peer Apart program
to recognize dedicated individuals
who have been involved in the peer
review of 100 or more papers.
Members who commit their time to
peer review papers make substantial
contributions to the industrys literature
by helping to ensure that the papers
published in SPEs technical journals
are the highest quality. Over time,
Outstanding Technical Editors Named
Every year, SPE recognizes members who
have made an exceptional effort to ensure
the technical excellence of the Societys
peer-reviewed journals. For their con-
tributions, the following individuals are
recipients of the 2015 Outstanding Tech-
nical Editor Award.
Journal of Canadian Petroleum
Technology
Dennis Beliveau, Consultant
Bruce S. Carey, Peters &
Company
Malcolm Greaves,
University of Bath
Harpreet Singh, The University
of Texas at Austin
Shayan Tavassoli, The University
of Texas at Austin
Junjing Zhang, ConocoPhillips
JPT DECEMBER 2015
we focused on our ability to deliver
essential global programs and services
consistent with our mission. All seven
global offices (Calgary, Dallas, Dubai,
Houston, Kuala Lumpur, London, and
Moscow) will remain open to provide
services to members in thoseregions.
Staff reductions affected all
departments and all offices, except
these individuals volunteer hundreds
of hours to the Society, making SPE
journals a valuable resource for
theindustry.
This year, nine individuals join the
elite group who has reached the mile-
stone of reviewing 100 or more tech-
nical papersbringing the total
membership of A Peer Apart to 143
dedicatedmembers.
Oil and Gas Facilities
Theodore C. Frankiewicz, Spec
Services
Wayne W. Frenier, Consultant
SPE Drilling & Completion
Glen Benge, Benge Consulting
Bob Carpenter, Chevron
John M. Cook, Schlumberger
David A. Curry, Baker Hughes
Zhi Fang, Brunei Shell Petroleum
Laurent Gerbaud, Mines Paris Tech
George Gillespie, Weatherford
Patrick Kenny, Murphy E&P
Company
M. Evren Ozbayoglu, University
of Tulsa
Bharath N. Rao, BTech Soft
Frederic J. Santarelli, Geomec
Geoffrey T. Weighill, retired from BP
the Moscow office, and rolls back
some of the growth that has occurred
over the past few years, bringing
SPEs total headcount back to 2011
levels. A few programs will be
scaled back, but core functions will
remain. SPE does not expect that
members will be adversely affected by
this reduction.
Frank F. Chang, Saudi Aramco
Shilin Chen, Halliburton Security DBS
Peter J. Clifford, BP Exploration Europe
Niall Fleming, Statoil
Wayne W. Frenier, Consultant
Guohua Gao, Shell
Christopher J. Jablonowski, Shell
Stephen E. Laubach, Bureau of
Economic Geology
Silviu Livescu, Baker Hughes Canada
Bailin Wu, CSIRO Earth Sciences &
Resource Engineering
SPE Economics & Management
Chidi Amudo, Chevron Australia
William J. Bailey, Schlumberger
Nikita Chugunov, Schlumberger
Amin Ettehad, The University of Texas
at Austin
Helen Gilman, Wipro Technologies
Robert Hammond, Chevron
Jeff T. Hawkins, Nexen Petroleum USA
David G. Kersey, Saudi Aramco
Franklyn G. Koch, retired from Chevron
Cheryl J. Lukehart, ConnexSys
Engineering
James L. Smith, Southern Methodist
University
John Tolle, Shell
Bart J. Willigers, BG Group-GTC JPT
91
 PEOPLE
NIGEL McKIM, SPE, has been appointed nonexecutive director
of the board for MX Oil. He was most recently the chief opera-
tions officer of Nobel Upstream, responsible for building a port-
folio of assets in Texas, the UK, and Azerbaijan. McKim started
his career as a reservoir engineer at Shell in Oman and has sev-
eral years of experience in field development planning and pro-
duction. He was the West Africa asset manager at Vitol Servic-
es, director of predevelopment at Hess Services, and subsurface
manager for business development activities and the Liverpool
Bay project at BHP Billiton. McKim holds a BSc in civil engineer-
ing from the University of Bristol and an MSc in petroleum engi-
neering from Imperial College London.
NISHANT DIGHE, SPE, departed from his
position as Panoro Energys president and
chief operating officer at the end of Novem-
ber. He will continue as an adviser for a tran-
sitional period. In 2007, Dighe cofounded
Pan-Petroleum, which led to the creation of
Panoro. He has held several senior manage-
ment positions, including chief executive officer (CEO) of Afri-
can Energy Equity Resources and president Africa and CEO of
Panoro. He has also worked at ExxonMobil, Marakon Associ-
ates, and Sasol. Dighe holds masters degrees in chemical engi-
neering and petroleum engineering from Imperial College Lon-
don and an MBA from the University of Warwick.
MATT McINTOSH, SPE, has been appoint-
ed a key account manager at Greenes Ener-
gy Group. In his new role, he will establish
and maintain relationships with the key cli-
ents of the company. Before this, he was the
Chevron key account manager at FMC Tech-
nologies, responsible for developing and ex-
ecuting account strategies, managing regional account teams,
and leading sales. McIntosh holds a BA in political science from
Texas A&M University.
MIKE BOWMAN, SPE, was appointed the
chair of the petroleum engineering program
at Texas A&M University at Qatar. In 2011,
Bowman retired from BP as vice president of
geoscience and subsurface description and
became part-time professorial chair in de-
92
velopment and production geology at the University of Man-
chester. He remains a visiting professor there. His areas of ex-
pertise are clastic reservoir systems for conventional and
unconventional resources, subsurface uncertainty and risk
management, and field development and production. Bowman
holds a BSc in geology from the University of Leeds and a PhD
in geology from the University of Sheffield.
Member Deaths
Lee A. Adams Jr., Houston, Texas, USA
S.C. (Sam) Berry, The Woodlands, Texas, USA
Tommy D. Bolin, Katy, Texas, USA
Jack E. Brown, Midland, Texas, USA
Birto R. Brumby, Houston, Texas, USA
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Jack Marshall, Montgomery, Texas, USA
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James D. Murdoch Jr., Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Alan Nickson, The Hague, The Netherlands
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Frank Perkins Jr., Westlake, Louisiana, USA
Ronald J. Robinson, College Station, Texas, USA
William H. Silcox, Incline Village, Nevada, USA
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JPT DECEMBER 2015
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94 JPT DECEMBER 2015

JAMES E. SMITH & ASSOCIATES, INC.
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903-593-9660 903-593-5527 (FAX) 800-587-9660
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ADIPEC 2016 National Oilwell Varco
James E. Smith, P.E., Registered Professional Engineer Page 29 Page 33, Cover 4

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 SPE EVENTS
WORKSHOPS
79 December Kuala LumpurSPE
Process Safety & Integrity
1316 December CairoSPE Deep Well
Challenges 5
2427 January YangonSPE Challenges
of Frontier Deepwater Drilling
2627 January CalgarySPE
RefracturingWhats Working and Why?
24 February AmsterdamSPE
Integrated Water Management
810 February DubaiSPE/EAGE
Geosteering and Well Placement
910 February Abu DhabiSPE The
Journey to 70% Recovery FactorFrom
Vision to Plan
1517 February Abu DhabiSPE Flow
Assurance
1617 February MangafSPE Applied
Tracer Technology To Maximise
Hydrocarbon Recovery
Find complete listings of upcoming SPE workshops, conferences, symposiums, and forums at www.spe.org/events.
CONFERENCE REVIEW (Continued from page 51)
challenges they face will positively help
improve the national economy, he said.
Improving Oil Recovery
During the EOR/improved oil recovery
session, panelists said that the region
requires cutting-edge technological solu-
tions to improve oil recovery factors,
which are low compared with neighbor-
ing countries in the Middle East.
Most of the easy oil has already
been extracted, leaving a non-negligible
quantity of oil in the reservoirs, Helmy
Sayyouh, a professor at Cairo University,
said. But the important question is how
much oil is recoverable and what tech-
niques could be applied.
The oil recovery factor in Egypt stands
at 34%, according to Shaheen El-Sayed,
vice chairman of production for Middle
East and North Africa at IPR Egypt. Alge-
rias reservoirs, which require the deploy-
ment of EOR techniques, have a recov-
ery factor of less than 20%, said Salah
Khebri, the energy minister of Algeria.
96
CONFERENCES
69 December DohaInternational 1821 January DubaiSPE Next
Petroleum Technology Conference
913 April TulsaSPE Improved Oil
Recovery Conference
1113 April StavangerSPE International
Conference and Exhibition on Health,
Safety, Security, Environment, and
SocialResponsibility: Sustaining
our FutureThrough Innovation and
Collaboration
1213 April GalvestonSPE/
IADC Managed Pressure Drilling and
Underbalanced Operations Conference
and Exhibition
SYMPOSIUMS
89 March Abu DhabiSPE Women in
Leadership: Exceeding Expectations
910 March AmmanSPE IraqThe
Petroleum Potentiality and Future of
Energy
Conventional technology has recov-
ered approximately 50% of the original
oil in place. However, ongoing research
projects are set to boost this level to more
than 75%, as was the case at one of the
reservoirs operated by Total in the Abu Al
Bukhoosh field in Abu Dhabi.
Panelists said that the development of
EOR projects may take up to 10 years. In
Egypt, a number of oil fields are expect-
ed to undergo one or more of the EOR
methods in the near future. However, the
implementation of any of the EOR meth-
ods involves high capital expenditure.
These processes are difficult and high-
risk operations, Sayyouh said.
In spite of the research programs and
pilot projects in Egypt over the past decade,
the industry has limited experience in large
field development. Scarcity of field experi-
ences have prompted the current develop-
ment of a knowledge-based expert system
that can facilitate the reservoir engineers
task of selecting the most appropriate EOR
method, Sayyouh said.
FORUMS
Generation of Smart Reservoir
Management: The Eminent Role of
BigDataAnalytics
1416 March DubaiSPE Well
Construction Fluids 2025: Meeting
theChallenges
CALL FOR PAPERS
SPE Asia Pacific Oil & Gas Conference
andExhibition Perth
Deadline: 4 December
International Petroleum Technology
Conference Bangkok
Deadline: 18 December
SPE North America Artificial Lift
Conference and Exhibition
The Woodlands
Deadline: 8 January
Egyptian reservoirs are technical-
ly good candidates for EOR techniques.
Among the techniques that can be
deployed in reservoirs in Egypt is immis-
cible gas injection. Steam injection is fea-
sible in some of the Gulf of Suez res-
ervoirs, while chemical methods are
feasible in most of the Western Desert
reservoirs, he said.
Wave stimulation and microbial EOR
technology may also be introduced in
the fields.
The identification of applicable EOR
methods and determination of their suit-
ability to candidate oil fields in Egypt
must also include the assessment of tech-
nical and economic criteria.
This problem presents a real chal-
lenge as you need experts to help sort,
process, analyze, and cross-reference
the acquired reservoir data, coupled
with other information, to be able to
achieve the most feasible selection of
techniques in an efficient and profitable
way, Sayyouh said. JPT
JPT DECEMBER 2015
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