Steam generation for the purposes of thermal recovery includes facilities to treat the water (produced water or fresh water), generate the steam, and transport it to the injection wells. A steamflood uses high-quality steam injected into an oil reservoir. The quality of steam is defined as the weight percent of steam in the vapor phase to the total weight of steam. The higher the steam quality, the more heat is carried by this steam. High-quality steam provides heat to reduce oil viscosity, which mobilizes and sweeps the crude to the producing wells.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait resumed production at the joint Wafra and Khafji oil field in the Neutral Zone between the two countries on 1 July. The production also comes as both countries' additional OPEC cuts ended in June. The Kuwait Oil Ministry said on Twitter the production in the Khafji joint field began again after a month-long hiatus based on the operational plans between the two parties. The restart was also in line with plans announced in June by Saudi Arabia Chevron, which jointly operates the Wafra field with Kuwait Gulf Oil Co. Both countries agreed in December 2019 to begin production at the oil fields after being offline since 2015 because of an operational dispute.

After 4½ years out of service, the massive Wafra oil field is set to resume production soon, and ensuring a smooth restart is no small order. Speaking at a technical session, Ed Colina, an operations advisor at Chevron, outlined the approach the company took to assess its readiness for the task. Located within the Saudi-Kuwaiti Onshore Partitioned Neutral Zone, Wafra is a joint venture of Saudi Arabian Chevron and Kuwait Gulf Oil Company (KGOC). The field was shut down in May 2015 as part of a dispute between the two nations, primarily regarding an extension of the original concession of the field that gave Chevron rights there until 2039; Kuwait claimed it had not been consulted about the deal. Saudi Arabia said at the time that the halt was due to environmental reasons. The Saudi Ministry of Energy and KGOC announced on 24 December 2019 that they had reached an agreement with Kuwait to resume production from Wafra and other fields in the neutral zone, which can reportedly produce as much as 500,000 B/D.

The First Eocene is a multibillion-barrel heavy-oil carbonate reservoir in the Wafra field, located in the Partitioned Zone (PZ) between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. After more than 60 years of primary production, expected recovery is low and provides a good target for enhanced-oil-recovery (EOR) processes. A phased piloting approach has been used to reduce the uncertainties (subsurface and surface) related to application of thermal EOR processes in this field. Wafra is one of four major fields located in the PZ (Figure 1). Because of the low primary oil recovery and large original oil in place of the Wafra Eocene reservoirs, a significant EOR opportunity exists.

After 4½ years out of service, the massive Wafra oil field is set to resume production sometime soon, and ensuring a smooth restart is no small order. Speaking at a technical session during the 2020 International Petroleum Technology Conference (IPTC), Ed Colina, an operations adviser at Chevron, outlined the approach the company took to assess its readiness for the task. Located within the Saudi-Kuwaiti Onshore Partitioned Neutral Zone, Wafra is a joint venture of Saudi Arabian Chevron and Kuwait Gulf Oil Company (KGOC). The field was shut down in May 2015 as part of a dispute between the two nations, primarily regarding an extension of the original concession of the field that gave Chevron rights there until 2039; Kuwait claimed it had not been consulted about the deal. Saudi Arabia said at the time that the halt was due to environmental reasons. The Saudi Ministry of Energy and KGOC announced on 24 December that an agreement had been reached with Kuwait to resume production from Wafra and other fields in the neutral zone, which can reportedly produce as much as 500,000 BOPD.

The First Eocene is a multibillion-barrel heavy-oil carbonate reservoir in the Wafra field, located in the Partitioned Zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. After more than 60 years of primary production, expected recovery is low and provides a good target for enhanced-oil-recovery processes.

The First Eocene is a multibillion-barrel heavy-oil carbonate reservoir in the Wafra field, located in the Partitioned Zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. After more than 60 years of primary production, expected recovery is low and provides a good target for enhanced-oil-recovery processes.

Sucker-rod pumping wells are the most widely used producing wells in China. 94% of the 200,000 oil wells in CNPC are sucker-rod pumping wells. It is urgent to reduce the cost of every single well based on the well diagnosis and optimization methods under the background of low oil price and the IoT. Rich working experience of field engineers could help them diagnose some conspicuous abnormal well conditions by electrical power curves easily, but the scientific diagnosis methods have still not be established, and the potential of electrical power curves of the producing well is far from being fully tapped.

The aim of this work is to diagnose the working condition of the sucker-rod pumping wells both on and under the ground based on the data from electrical power curves by machine learning. The methods shaped by the learning of the electrical power curves from nearly 600 wells mainly separate into 3 steps. The first is the diagnosis of conspicuous abnormal well conditions such as motor belt burning, motor belt slippage, two phase electrics, upper rod break, lower rod break et al. The prediction experience was obtained from the statistical learning of the mean and variance values after we equally split the 600 power curve values into 10 sub-groups. The second is the diagnosis of complex abnormal well conditions such as abnormal mechanical sound, slight tube leak, severe tube leak, pump stuck et al based on the combination of statistics and template vs diagnosed sample analysis. The third is the diagnosis of pumping conditions characterized by the remarkable prediction ability via deep learning. A surface well condition database was established and the corresponding electrical power curves were marked in real time. Based on the CNN technology, the model could recognize different pump working conditions such as insufficient liquid, gas influence, traveling valve leak, standing valve leak et al very well.

The work has been applied in the oil fields of Jilin and Daqing. The method has been tested on nearly thousand hundreds of producing well utilizing sucker rod pumping system. The model demonstrates very high accuracy with almost 90% similarity to the result diagnosed by corresponding pump dynamometers for large sample and 94% of abnormal well working conditions for small sample. What’s more, the work would reduce millions of investment on the sensors, equipment and manpower for the management of producing wells in CNPC each year in the context of industrial IoT.

2020 IPTC conference review The 12th International Petroleum Technology Conference, held 13–15 January in Dhahran, was the largest in its history with more than 18,000 attendees. It marked the first international multidisciplinary, intersociety oil and gas conference and exhibition to be held in Saudi Arabi and featured some of the globe’s top oil and gas executives, including the energy ministers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Saudi Aramco’s president and CEO, and the CEOs of ExxonMobil, Total, Petronas, and Woodside. Below are highlights from some of the plenary, panel, and technical sessions that took place during the 3-day event. Welcoming a New Energy Era The conference opened with a distinguished panel offering its outlook for oil and gas markets in the next year and the next decade. “This is the first interdisciplinary oil and gas conference to be held in Saudi Arabia,” said Mahmoud M. Abdulbaqi, chairman of the board of ARGAS and chairman of the IPTC Board of Directors. The conference was hosted by Saudi Aramco. The opening panel included Abdulbaqi; Mohammed Y. Al-Qahtani, senior vice president, upstream, Saudi Aramco; Yasir Al-Rumayyan, chairman of the board, Saudi Aramco; and Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al-Saud, minister of energy, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. “These are exiting times for the Kingdom,” al-Qahtani said, as both Saudi Aramco and the oil and gas industry at large face a new decade of growing demand but with a need to lighten the industry’s carbon footprint. Saudi Aramco raised a record $29.4 billion in its recent IPO. Al-Rumayyan said the oil and gas industry thinks in terms of decades, which runs up against the notion that the “energy transition” will occur “from a definitive point A to a definitive point B” and will take place at the same time in the same way everywhere. Instead, he offered what he called the “pragmatic narrative” of a transition happening over decades and that there “will be many energy transitions” at different speeds. The more narrow narrative is having negative consequences for the industry, he added, because it is influencing some banks to back away from funding oil and gas projects. This lack of investment eventually will lead to a supply shortage that could cause oil price spikes in the near future, he said. He acknowledged the need of the industry to “lighten the carbon footprint” through technology and innovation, but it must continue to meet the world’s energy needs. The industry must never forget its role to responsibly supply energy required to power the world and sustain economies, he said. If the industry “offers real solutions with real energy to meet real needs” it will last well into the future, he added. Saudi Energy Minister Al-Saud noted the historically important role that Saudi Arabia has played since the discovery of oil about 80 years ago. The global economic growth of the past half century, which paved the way for transformative development and lifted many out of poverty, would not have taken place without the stability of oil supply from Saudi Arabia.

Although the Partitioned Zone (PZ) between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait has been a prolific producer for over sixty years, significant resource potential remains in underexplored stratigraphic intervals. The Upper Cretaceous Hartha Formation is one of these opportunities. The Hartha interval has been penetrated by numerous wells targeting the deeper section in PZ, and although hydrocarbon presence has been observed in the Hartha, the play has not been fully characterized prior to this study.

Stratigraphic studies using core and well data concluded that the Hartha was deposited on a broad, low-angle carbonate ramp setting that includes the outer ramp, middle ramp, ramp margin, and inner ramp environments. Gross Depositional Environment maps were constructed based on these interpretations and show an approximately N-S strike-oriented ramp, similar to the orientation of the present-day shoreline of the PZ. Reactivation of basement highs during the Late Cretaceous influenced Hartha deposition, with high-energy grainstones deposited over and around these structural highs having the best potential for reservoir development.

Seismic interpretation was performed on recently acquired PZ 3D data to map key surfaces in the Hartha to Ahmadi section. The Hartha interval thins over structural highs and is significantly eroded by the pre-Hartha and pre-Aruma unconformities. This paleo-high structural trend in western PZ is also where the ramp margin grainstone fairway had developed and has been interpreted to contain the best reservoirs. Prospective areas are primarily structural closures over these highs inside the ramp margin fairway with stratigraphic facies changes to non-reservoir facies defining the lateral extent of the trap.