Two deepwater rigs that were likely destined for the scrap yard appear to have found a second lease on life as offshore launchpads. The development was first reported on Twitter by reporters with NASASpaceFlight, an independent website covering the space industry, who shared photos of a drilling rig in Brownsville, Texas, which sits along the Gulf of Mexico. The images showed a rig named Deimos and the website reported that a second rig named Phobos is also sitting quayside in Brownsville. The semisubmersibles both measure 240 × 255 ft and were formerly known as ENSCO 8500 and ENSCO 8501. According to public reports they were sold for $3.5 million apiece by Valaris in August.

The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has sent a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) requesting that specific members of the energy workforce receive the COVID-19 vaccine sooner, moving from Phase 1c to 1b. In the letter, signed by all FERC commissioners, the agency says, “Over the course of the last year, workers at electric utilities across the country have engaged in heroic efforts to keep the lights on in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their work ensures the functioning of our nation’s critical infrastructure—everything from our telecommunications systems to the hospitals that care for our most vulnerable.” The vaccine allocation guidance from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices places the energy workforce in Phase 1c. FERC requests that “a subset of the energy workforce … specifically, highly trained electrical field workers, power plant operators, transmission and distribution grid operators, and personnel who procure the energy needed to balance the grid on a moment-to-moment basis” be included in Phase 1b.

ConocoPhillips said last week that it has finalized its acquisition of Permian Basin oil and gas company Concho Resources. The all-stock deal valued at $9.7 billion was announced in October amid a flurry of other mergers and acquisitions designed to consolidate the US shale sector. ConocoPhillips’ purchase of its smaller rival has netted it an additional 550,000 acres and around 200,000 B/D in the Permian. The Houston-based oil and gas producer now holds about 1.5 million acres across the Lower 48 which hold an estimated 17,000 drilling locations that can generate profits at $40/bbl. By the time the deal was announced, Concho was operating around 2,100 horizontal wells in the Permian while ConocoPhillips had less than 200.

The glossary is a living growing list of important E&P terms and require continual enhancements. If you would like to contribute to the glossary send an email to petrowiki(at)spe.org.

The glossary is a living growing list of important E&P terms and require continual enhancements. If you would like to contribute to the glossary send an email to petrowiki(at)spe.org.

The schematics at the bottom of Figure 1.3 illustrate the pore-level recovery mechanisms discussed earlier (Figure 1.2). At the end of the waterflood, residual oil is a discontinuous phase that occupies approximately 40% of the pore space. Early in the miscible flood [3.0 to 3.5 total pore volumes (PV) injected], some of this oil has been miscibly displaced by solvent from the higher-permeability flow path (on the pore scale). However, some oil also has been initially bypassed by solvent. Note that this bypassing at the pore level is much different from solvent bypassing, which can occur at the field scale because of larger-scale reservoir heterogeneities.

Miscible flooding is presently the most-commonly used approach in enhanced oil recovery. Miscible flooding is a general term for injection processes that introduce miscible gases into the reservoir. A miscible displacement process maintains reservoir pressure and improves oil displacement because the interfacial tension between oil and water is reduced. A decision to implement a miscible flood in a particular field will usually consist of a sequential approach. First is the screening stage.

Nitrogen miscible injection is a process whereby nitrogen gas is injected into an oil reservoir above the Minimum Misciblity Pressure (MMP) to create a miscible vaporizing drive and increase the oil recovery factor. Discovered in 1970, the Jay field[1][2] produces primarily from a Jurassic-aged Smackover carbonate that is heavily dolomitized and has complex lithology. The entire pay interval was cored in virtually all the wells to provide an accurate geologic description and aid in unitization efforts. The field was unitized in 1973, and waterflooding began 4 days later to arrest pressure decline. Miscible N2 injection was started in 1981.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) flooding is a process whereby carbon dioxide is injected into an oil reservoir in order to increase output when extracting oil. There have been more CO2 projects than any other type of miscible flood. This project has been completed. It was thoroughly waterflooded before starting miscible injection. This sequence allows a straightforward evaluation of increased recovery because of miscible displacement.

The interpreted pressure transient test is a primary source of dynamic reservoir data. Tests on oil and gas wells are performed at various stages of drilling, completion, and production. Most pressure transient tests can be classified as either single-well productivity tests or descriptive reservoir tests. The pressure-flow convolution involves simultaneous bottomhole flow rate and pressure measurements to correct for the variations of bottomhole pressure caused by flow rate fluctuations during drawdown tests.[1] When software deconvolution operators are used, trial and error is required to convolve a flow-rate schedule with a pressure function that approximates the true constant rate-equivalent pressure function, thus reproducing the measured pressures.