REDEVELOPING AN OIL FIELD WITHOUT DRILLING A NEW WELL
During a lunchtime talk in Aberdeen in October, Curtis Bracher from NEO Next presented on the Affleck field redevelopment in the UK North Sea. The room was full of people eager to know how this project was carried out; the field had produced oil for some years but had been shut in since 2016. Curtis nicely showed how oil production since start-up in January this year has been twice as high as the maximum production in the years before. The reason? Not because new wells were drilled, but simply because better gas-handling systems were put in place. In other words, re-opening the existing wells superimposed by infrastructure adjustments was sufficient to boost deliverability from this complex Chalk field reservoir.
“I WENT BACK TO OIL”
A seasoned geologist told me at a recent conference that he had taken on some work in oil and gas again, despite a pledge to himself a few years ago to only do energy transition projects. It shows the status of the energy transition; if a well-connected and very experienced geoscientist is unable to secure any work in the energy transition space, it does not bode well for the pace with which this transition is progressing.
THE MONEY-SCRAPING EXERCISE THAT GEOTHERMAL DRILLING IS
“I have never seen this during my career in core analysis,” said someone to me the other day. He was referring to a core cut in a geothermal well in a European capital city. “After the major expense of cutting a core from deep down, all the operator asked us to do was obtain a few plugs to run porosity and permeability tests on,” he said. That was it. It shows how tight budgets are in the geothermal industry; there is no room to properly analyse data, even when that data was acquired at great cost. This is one of the problems of core analysis, too; it is always one of the last parts of the drilling budget, so only a bit of cost overrun will immediately result in subsequent work being scrutinised.
THE SAUDI JOB MARKET
Until recently, the risk of losing your job in Aramco was only something that the expats needed to worry about. For nationals, it used to be a place where you could spend your time until retirement. That has now changed, somebody told me the other day. Even Saudi nationals have to compete against each other and no longer have the guarantee of keeping their jobs for life. It is a sign of an increasingly competitive landscape in the oil business.
