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David Bamford

Much is made of the fact that the oil & gas resources of our planet will last many more decades: this is evident if one digs into the most recent BP annual Statistical Review of World Energy. It is also true that much of this petroleum still needs to be found, whether in new discoveries or upgrades of existing discoveries or increases in the recovery factor of currently producing fields or even in the resurrection of currently abandoned fields.

Finding Petroleum in the future will take us to tougher areas, more complex geology, more difficult reservoirs and, unless we are very smart, much higher Finding Costs. It would be wrong, ironic and a great shame if, as companies increased expenditures coming out of the current downturn, they find less barrels and molecules due to tough problems and rampant oil field service prices!

In currently producing fields, this translates into inventing the most efficient and effective way of finding additional petroleum. After all, there is an old adage which says "the best place to look for petroleum is in a producing field!"; in technical terms, this equates to increasing ultimate recovery factors from where they might be perceived to be today, say 25-30%, to 60 or even 70+%.

In my opinion, for many oil & gas companies the best way to do this will be to simply adopt The Digital Oil Field in all its aspects. For some excellent insights into this concept, I refer you to a presentation by David Latin of BP. You can also find a detailed description of BP's Field of the Future concept on the company's web-site.

However, there is a risk that in the current economic climate, installation of a Digital Oil Field, entailing heavy upfront capital expenditure for long-term operating benefit, may be seen as an expensive luxury. This is an understandable if not entirely sensible view point: we are in "Hard Times", not because oil & gas prices are desperately low but because the lesson we have learned from the volatility of the last 12-18 months is that future oil & gas prices are desperately uncertain.

Nonetheless, the right question is – how do we dramatically reduce the costs of the Digital Oil Field so that installation makes sense at (almost) any oil or gas price?

Let's focus on one of those technologies that is especially relevant to the recovery factor question, namely seismic monitoring. How could we ensure that it makes economic sense to shoot 3D seismic - and repeat 3D, also known as 4D - on any producing oil/gas field in Russia and the FSU? Drawing on lessons from the proliferation of 3D seismic technology in the 1990's, the key seems not to attack prices directly but to focus on significant reductions in cycle-time, that is, the time between planning a survey and obtaining a useful sub-surface interpretation that finds areas of un-swept petroleum. In other words, faster led, and will lead, to cheaper and better.

It seems pretty clear how not to do this. Old-fashioned onshore acquisition techniques, involving cutting swathe after swathe through the tundra or the wheat fields and armies of men lugging vast quantities of cable around, up mountains, across roads and rivers, through swamps, seem like - and should be - a thing of the past, on efficiency, effectiveness and HSE grounds. Likewise, ultra-high-resolution techniques - no matter how unique their inventors might think they are - do not seem to be the way forward either, although it would be interesting to see authenticated cycle-time and cost/sq km comparisons published, perhaps on the InterNet.

Instead, we should be looking to the wireless, cable-less systems on offer from ION, OYO Geospace or iSeis, and the innovative approach to sources advocated by Ian Jack.
I have documented evidence from the previously mentioned offshore 3D history that an intense focus on doing things faster will lead to cheaper (dramatically reduced unit costs), in turn meaning that many more, bigger, 3D surveys will be commissioned.

Contractors should therefore see this as a golden opportunity to take part in the dramatic growth of onshore 3D and 4D rather than as a threat to their established systems.

Labels: digital oil field, Russian oil gas news

posted by The Rogtec Team @ 14:33 

1 Comments:

 Anonymous said...

For up to date news check out the following

http://davelatin-digitaloilfield.blogspot.com/

this contains some good insights

21 October 2009 02:50  

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