Although polymer flooding has become a promising enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technique, no field tests have been performed to date in Alaska’s underdeveloped heavy-oil reservoirs. Most of ConocoPhillips’ oil and gas production by the end of the next decade will come from its unconventional operations. But, for the near-term, the Houston independent will rely on conventional assets as it seeks to keep spending in check, decline rates low, and cash flow on the rise. This paper presents the data collected by an ultrasound downhole scanner, demonstrating a novel method for diagnosing multilateral wells. Electrical-submersible-pump (ESP) technology is a proven artificial-lift method for shallow, low-pressure reservoirs such as those found in the West Sak viscous oil field in Alaska.

The complete paper describes the overall project execution of the Aasta Hansteen field development on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) north of the Arctic Circle. It is the deepest field yet developed on the NCS in 1300 m of water. The Norwegian operator will increase its ownership of the giant Johan Sverdrup field before the field commences oil production this November. In need of an exploration boost, Norway doled out a record 83 production licenses in mature areas of the Norwegian Continental Shelf to 33 firms. Norway hopes for a continued rise in offshore exploration and development activity to ensure steady oil and gas production through the next decade.

The combination will operate and share ownership of midstream gas assets in the Utica and Marcellus Shale plays. CPPIB financially backs operator Encino Energy, which last year acquired Chesapeake Energy’s Utica assets. The high level of dissolved iron commonly present in the Marcellus waters of Pennsylvania and West Virginia adversely affects the ability of scale inhibitor to inhibit calcium carbonate scale.

The complete paper discusses the systematic approach adopted by a service company to achieve the goal of safely abandoning wells offshore southwest Brazil with different completion types using light workover vessels. Plug-and-abandonment (P&A) operations can be expensive, leading to negative net present value. Historically, P&A operations in the North Sea—estimated to hold some 3,000 wells of declining production—were performed with either drilling or workover rigs.

The recent increase in global liquid fuel inventory has been largely driven by travel restrictions, and reduced economic activity. Supply is expected come back down as demand and prices recover. Led by Texas and New Mexico, year-over-year crude output jumped by 11% according to the US Energy Information Administration. Going forward, new records will be set but at a slower pace. While renewable energy sources are poised to see major growth, possibly displacing natural gas as the top source of electricity in the US, hydrocarbon production will remain above or near current historical highs until at least 2050.

Houston-based Occidental had earmarked the money to ease debt from buying Anadarko. Hassi Messaoud is a mature oil field with more than 1,100 production wells. Approximately half of the wells are natural flow and the other half use continuous gas lift (CGL) with concentric (CCE) strings.

Duri Field in Indonesia is the largest active steamflood project in the world. The field produces 73,000 BOPD, and 10,000 optimization jobs are executed annually to support base production. The objective of this study was to look at factors that can affect a temperature log and steps that can be taken to improve temperature-measurement accuracy. This paper covers the staged field-development methodology, including analysis and evaluation of various development concepts, that enabled the company to optimize both completion design and artificial-lift selection, reducing downtime and lowering operating costs by nearly 50%. 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.

In the complete paper, the authors derive a novel analytical solution to model the temperature signal associated with the shut-in during flowback and production periods. The room for error and cost overruns just got a lot smaller with the escalating need to make operations more efficient and leaner with fewer resources and investors continuing to prioritize ESG alongside profitability. Permian Basin operators and service companies met to discuss completions diagnostics, flowback strategies, water management, and artificial lift strategies. This paper evaluates the ability of different groups of surfactants to improve oil recovery in unconventional liquid reservoirs (ULRs) by experimentally simulating the fracture treatment to represent surfactant imbibition in a ULR core fracture during a soaking flowback.

The effects of turbulence/shear and thermal driving force on wax-deposition characteristics were experimentally studied using a waxy crude oil from the Gulf of Mexico. Systematic experimental and modeling approaches to designing a safe operating strategy for a 5-km deepwater-subsea-flowline case study are presented to address unplanned shutdown and restart events for waxy-crude production.

The complete paper discusses an advanced matrix-stimulation work flow that brings reliability and flexibility to the acidizing of tight carbonate water injectors and has delivered injectivity improvements tight carbonate onshore reservoirs in the Middle East. In a collaborative project, the possibility of measuring fluid levels in a wellbore by use of distributed optical pressure gauges was conceived, prototyped, field-trialed, and further developed to a point of widespread commercialization. The treatment in a deepwater, frac-packed well with fiber-optic-equipped coiled tubing (CT) and a rotating, hydraulic high-pressure jetting tool achieved successful stimulation of a 500-ft-long frac-packed zone after several previous failures using different techniques. In the past decade, fiber-optic -based sensing has opened up opportunities for in-well reservoir surveillance in the oil and gas industry. In this paper, the authors present a recent example of single-phase-flow profiling with distributed acoustic sensing.