“70% of global oil production is taking place from mature fields,” said Babak Moradi from Three60Energy at the start of his talk on Day 2 of the annual DigEx conference in Stavanger yesterday.
It is therefore no surprise to see that a major effort is put into squeezing the remaining barrels out of these old giants, as a quick look at the NPD website also learns: most development wells being drilled at the moment are targeting compartments in the big fields found decades ago such as Snorre, Statfjord and Ekofisk.
In turn, it is therefore no surprise that efforts to streamline operations using a digital approach not only focus on exploration, but also on mature fields. A good example in that regard was presented by Merete Tveit and Henning Lillejord from ConocoPhillips who showed how the operator of Ekofisk built a so-called Data Warehouse in which all the information from all the 500 wells drilled into the famous Chalk reservoir is made available with the touch of a button.
“This year’s DigEx featured an unprecedented amount of projects from operators of all sizes. It is refreshing to see how far we have come in three years since the launch of DigEx and I can say that the NCS is 100% doing digital.” Dan Austin, Business Development Manager at Earth Science Analytics.
Similarly, Elliott Moore and Diego Corbo from Rock Flow Dynamics explained how through an integrated static and dynamic modelling approach, future drilling opportunities in the Enquest-operated Magnus field in the UK Northern North Sea could be de-risked.
Optical fibre
Stefan Dümmong gave an interesting account of how Equinor applies digital solutions to a rather new field development: the Johan Sverdrup field. Using a network of fibre optic cables in six production wells, the operator generates around 500 Terabytes per week, which allows engineers to do rapid interventions should anything go wrong in the wellbore. Given that the field is rather young though, major incidents have not yet taken place.
A chat at the coffee machine
Michael van der Haven from CGI subsequently explained how the OSDU project facilitates the use of subsurface data in an open and standardised way. This was further illustrated by a team from Neptune who showed that relying on streamlined communication backed up by data could prevent situations where well designs are based on critical information passed on in a chat around the coffee machine.
The take-up of the OSDU way of working is not being adopted across the operator spectrum though, as Nils-André Aarseth from AkerBP pointed out that the costs of embarking on it is supposedly unknown. However, with Lundin being a member of the OSDU initiative, it remains to be seen how this will pan out once the two companies are fully integrated.
Against this backdrop of efforts to squeeze another million barrels out of mature giant fields, Dag Helland-Hansen from EMGS provided an overview of opportunities for geoscientists in the years to come. When one combines the need for continued investment in oil and gas developments with the increased diversification of energy sources such as wind, geothermal and deep-sea mining, Helland-Hansen concluded that the future for geoscientists is bright indeed.
HENK KOMBRINK
