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Techbits From 15 to 16 October, more than 120 oil and gas professionals converged in Bergen, Norway for the fourth SPE Norwegian Petroleum Technology Conference (PTC). The conference, which was held in conjunction with Norway's Offshore Technology Days Exhibition, allowed managers, engineers, and business development planners to discuss how Norway plans to maintain its status as a global energy technology leader and incorporate innovations from companies big and small, far and wide. "The conference was really focused around StatoilHydro's dominant role in the Norwegian oil and gas industry and how they plan to ensure continual development of new technologies and put them to use," said Jan Roar Drechsler, Chairperson of the PTC Program Committee and the SPE Stavanger section, as well as a Principal Engineer and Technical Representative for Completions with StatoilHydro. "In the past [prior to the merger of Statoil and Norsk Hydro], there was a sort of competition between Statoil and Hydro to be first in the development of a new technology. There is concern that now some development programs, either within the company or with different partners, might be put aside or altered. People wanted to know how these would go on in the future." The first two presenters elaborated on this concern by outlining the role of technology in developing the reserves on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) and the dangers of scaling back future technology development programs. Roy Ruså, Vice President of Technology for Petoro, discussed upcoming technology challenges for operators and service providers in his talk "Technology Critical—Do We Act Accordingly?" Ruså pointed out that the mature NCS province still has many significant business opportunities, but they are linked to even greater technical challenges, such as realizing remaining reserves from smaller prospects, reducing nonrecoverable reserves, and finding and developing new recoverable resources. He acknowledged StatoilHydro as the major driver of technology development on the NCS, but added that the company must continue making significant investments in R&D and increasingly diversify its portfolio of production solutions by pulling in more technologies from other industries and geographic regions.
Abstract Oil and gas companies increasingly require environments that support real-time E&P business processes, where field information, applications, and experts can be linked with operational managers and decision makers so daily operational parameters can be viewed and decisions executed. Most companies believe that making decisions in real time while leveraging global resources and infrastructure will help to improve their field productivity while reducing costs. Project team members are often collocated to ensure open communication and planning. However, since E&P activities often take place in remote and hostile parts of the world, global operations with dispersed personnel frequently require such operations support centers to be "virtualized." Reliable and secure information flow is central to ensuring success in the contemporary oil field. A previous paper outlined the significant challenges of process, networking, security, hardware, and software infrastructure encountered in creating and supporting these integrated operations centers. Another paper reported on some of the progress in meeting these challenges, with particular focus on the actual applications that support oilfield operations. This paper focuses on challenges and solutions encountered in actually using such integrated operations centers, with particular emphasis on people issues, including change management, training, and collaboration. Real examples from working centers are used to illustrate the issues and solutions. Introduction Integrated operations centers are often a part of Digital Oilfield initiatives. These initiatives often include:The increasing application of computing devices, and the deployment of real time sensors from sand face to fiscal meters, thus enabling real time monitoring of the oil field. More accurate models that simulate the behavior of complex physical systems such as oil and gas reservoirs, wells, gathering networks, and processing facilities. These models are used throughout the life cycle of the asset, including planning, surveillance, and optimization work processes. The increasing use of collaboration, especially because of scarcity of experienced resources, often due to aging of the oil and gas work force. Access from anywhere to data about assets in real time and on demand by software, people and processes as a result of improved communications capabilities. The last two points often involve significant changes to the daily activities of people and organizations. It is now well known that such changes require effort to be successful. "Change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. The current definition of Change Management includes both organizational change management processes and individual change management models, which together are used to manage the people side of change." In previous papers, the authors outlined the significant challenges of process, networking, security, hardware, and software infrastructure encountered in creating and supporting these integrated operations centers, and also reported on some of the progress in meeting these challenges, with particular focus on the actual applications that support oilfield operations. This paper places particular emphasis on people issues, including change management, training, and collaboration. Real examples from working centers are used to illustrate the issues and solutions.
- Europe (0.49)
- North America > United States > Texas (0.29)
R&D Grand Challenges - This is the first in a series of articles on the great challenges facing the oil and gas industry as outlined by the SPE R&D Committee. Subsequent articles will examine each of the challenges in depth. The R&D Grand Challenges Series, comprising articles published in JPT during 2011 and 2012, is available as a collection on OnePetro (SPE-163061-JPT). The SPE Research and Development (R&D) Committee would like to share with SPE members the results of a recent committee effort to identify the oil and gas industry’s major R&D challenges. Defining these challenges is important because the committee’s primary goal is to encourage R&D and promote dialog between industry and research groups with the aim of matching industry needs with R&D activities. Another key committee goal is to ensure that R&D capabilities and resources are used most effectively by addressing the highest priority E&P business needs. The R&D challenges comprise five broad upstream business needs: Increasing recovery factors In-situ molecular manipulation Carbon capture and sequestration Produced water management Higher resolution subsurface imaging of hydrocarbons. Increasing recovery factors refers to the need for innovative and cost-effective improved and enhanced oil recovery (IOR and EOR) and well geometry solutions for maturing reservoirs. In-situ molecular manipulation concerns the need for subsurface alteration of fluids or matrix to facilitate the production of very heavy oil, sour gas, or shale oil/gas while reducing the environmental footprint of production. Carbon capture and sequestration focuses on the need for effective methods for CO2 storage in subsurface geological structures. Produced water management refers to the challenge of safely and economically processing increasing volumes of produced water from mature reservoirs and the opportunity to serve growing needs for fresh water with this resource. Finally, higher resolution subsurface imaging of hydrocarbons concerns the need for more accurate and complete imaging of hydrocarbons during exploration, appraisal, field development, and production. Each of the five R&D challenges will be described more completely in upcoming JPT articles and white papers. With these publications, the authors will explain the scope of the industry’s current and future technology needs and discuss examples of emerging technologies or new R&D efforts that may improve the current approaches. Our hope is that the articles will promote further interest and discussion of technology needs within the industry. The white papers will be posted on the SPE website with the goal of acquainting basic science and R&D groups from both inside and outside our industry with our technology needs. The papers should provide researchers with sufficient information to stimulate innovative thoughts and to develop new research project proposals.
- Health, Safety, Environment & Sustainability > Environment > Water use, produced water discharge and disposal (1.00)
- Production and Well Operations > Well Operations and Optimization > Produced water management and control (0.96)
- Reservoir Description and Dynamics > Storage Reservoir Engineering > CO2 capture and sequestration (0.89)
- Health, Safety, Environment & Sustainability > Environment > Climate change (0.89)
Complex challenges require new solutions. Join Schlumberger's Alexander Zhandin and Bertrand Theuveny in this SPE Tech Talk as they discuss how well testing equipment is being deployed to solve production challenges around the wellhead and even around the facility. Register below to watch the Tech Talk.
Guest editorial As a member of the SPE Research and Development (R&D) Advisory Committee, I see numerous colleagues and organizations in the oil and gas industry articulating research needs to meet the challenges of increasing reserves, drilling faster, optimizing production, and more. Some focus on longer-term R&D and consider using technologies normally thought to be outside the upstream exploration and production business. For the SPE R&D Advisory Committee, identifying these challenges is important, as one of the committee's objectives is to encourage R&D and to match providers with users. This is not an easy task to accomplish, and it is even more difficult to measure performance. One solution is to provide a forum where both R&D providers and practitioners can speak and join in the discussion on how to "fuel the future." To this end, SPE will hold its second R&D Conference during 3–4 March 2009 in Lisbon, Portugal, with the theme of "Fueling the Future." The conference follows the first R&D Conference held in San Antonio, Texas in 2007. The first conference brought together attendees from operators, service companies, academia, and a broad spectrum of other organizations to identify and discuss the R&D challenges facing the industry as it seeks to find and produce the next trillion barrels. The second R&D Conference will focus on research areas thought to have significant potential to make material changes in recovery, productivity, and other metrics. One highlighted topic will be "Unlocking the Molecules," which may sound rather chemistry-oriented but is indeed a prominent topic in our industry. I invite you and your colleagues to join us for the second SPE R&D Conference. More details on the conference can be found at . Another way the R&D Advisory Committee has raised awareness of R&D challenges in our industry is through articles in JPT. Several series addressing R&D have been featured over the past few years. I had the pleasure of coordinating a series related to R&D challenges in each of the SPE disciplines, including Production and Operations; Projects, Facilities, and Construction; and Management and Information. Industry leaders in each discipline compiled an exceptional set of issues and challenges to address to ensure that the next trillion barrels of oil will be produced. Some of those challenges included reserves estimation, one-trip well concepts, multiphase flow, stranded gas, and controlling discharges to minimize environmental impact. Research on some of these topics is well documented in SPE journals and conference proceedings.
- Europe > Portugal > Lisbon > Lisbon (0.25)
- North America > United States > Texas > Bexar County > San Antonio (0.25)
- Reservoir Description and Dynamics (1.00)
- Management (1.00)