ROGTEC Interview with Kevin Dunn of IHS – Fekete Associates

Kevin Dunn joined IHS through the recent acquisition of Fekete Associates Inc. in April 2013.  Prior to the acquisition, Kevin was the Vice President, Sales and Marketing for Fekete, where he spent the last 16 years in various positions including conducting pipeline modeling projects and testing software.  Kevin was responsible for the opening of Fekete’s office in Houston, Texas in 2011, which served as a software sales and support center for Fekete’s US based customers.  Kevin’s primary responsibilities now include assisting large producing companies with integration and enterprise deployment of the Fekete software tools.

Tell us a little bit about IHS and its offerings to the global oil and gas markets

IHS is a global information company with world-class experts in the pivotal areas shaping today’s business landscape: energy, economics, geopolitical risk, sustainability and supply chain management. Businesses and governments rely on our, products, services and solutions to make faster and more confident decisions. From prospecting to market, energy businesses turn to IHS for analysis, critical information and analytical software to make high-impact decisions and develop strategies with speed and confidence.

IHS recently acquired Fekete Associates. What products does Fekete offer, and how do they fit into the current IHS portfolio?

Fekete is a leading provider of reservoir and production engineering services and software, with much of the focus aimed at well and asset performance analysis, optimization, and evaluation.  Established in 1973, the company has a deep foundation in conventional reservoir engineering principles, but has extended that expertise into unconventional reservoir analysis over the past 7 years.  The Fekete products and services are a natural fit and extension of the current geoscience analytical tools like IHS Petra^® and Kingdom^®.

What benefits does this acquisition bring to your customers?

The acquisition of Fekete allows us to now couple industry leading reservoir and production analysis tools with the data, making it seamless and efficient to connect to and extract information from the data.  In addition, the sharing of information between the geoscience and engineering disciplines can now be improved as our products begin to share results, with the possibility of reducing repetitive tasks that are currently done by both groups of professionals.

I understand that Fekete provides solutions across the oil and gas asset life cycle, but what Fekete solutions do you feel will be of best value to the Russian and Caspian upstream O&G sector?

Perhaps the greatest value to the Russian and Caspian sector will be the reservoir characterization and completion analysis capabilities in the flagship product F.A.S.T.RTA™.  When well performance is evaluated using only empirical methods such as decline analysis, there is little diagnostic capability to identify upside potential that could be realized through recompletion, downspacing, or by changing flowing pressure.  F.A.S.T. RTA’s diagnostic capabilities look at true reservoir potential, highlight reservoir damage, completion failure, and pressure support, and can help prioritize which wells will respond best to production optimization work.

Regional operators are working hard to maintain production in their brownfield operations. What solutions can Fekete provide to help operators ensure sustained maximum reservoir production?

The IHS Fekete Harmony™ environment, where software products like F.A.S.T. RTA are hosted, provides industry leading data management and reporting tools.  This is critical to an engineer working in a brownfield operation as dropping production volumes reduce the resources available to focus on the asset, yet production problems increase drastically at end of life.  The ability to manage a large number of wells and quickly identify the best actions to take to optimize production will help brownfield engineers make the most of their asset.

The development of unconventional resources in Russia has been slower than in some other parts to the world. But how can Fekete aid in the successful development of regional unconventional reserves?

Unconventional exploration and development is almost a completely new science.  As an engineer begins to adapt to unconventional reservoirs, words like precision and accuracy are used less, and concepts like non-unique solutions and probabilistic forecasting become common.  This change requires the addition of new software tools to an engineer’s toolbox, and the Fekete software tools are fully equipped for unconventional reservoirs, yet are still fully capable of handling the conventional reservoirs we were focused on for the first 33 years of our business.

Further, there have been many lessons learned and best practices adopted as a result of working on thousands of unconventional wells from around the world, the majority of them being in North America.  This wealth of information is captured in a knowledgebase that our support team uses to guide customers working unconventional assets.  These lessons and best practices also become part of the courses and workshops we teach.  Fekete provides the tools, the training and the support to ensure our customers get reliable results in these challenging plays.

As well as software solutions, I believe that Fekete also provide consultancy services to the market. What consultancy services from Fekete will be available to regional companies?

The Fekete consulting services are really focused around reservoir and production evaluation and optimization.  Each project is unique, and can range from a simple single well optimization study through pressure and rate transient analysis to a complex multidisciplinary turnkey Integrated Asset Development Plan for a basin including geology, pipeline modeling, simulation and economics.

Are the Fekete software and consultancy solutions provided in local language? Will customer support be provided in local languages?

An initiative has been started to develop multilingual support for the Fekete software tools, and we expect this to include Russian language support.  Fekete also has a number of Russian speaking technical experts on staff, both in the consulting services team and the software products who are able to provide services and support in Russian.

And finally, can you provide our readers with a recent customer success story, after having deployed Fekete solutions.

It’s difficult to give a specific example of this as many of the companies that have implemented our software tools realize a competitive advantage they don’t want to lose.  If you look at our customer base to identify general accomplishments, there are probably two major success experiences we can share.

The first experience that many of our customers share with us is the ability to more actively monitor their wells.  They often comment on their ability to identify early indicators of productivity loss on 70 or 80% of their wells instead of only 20 or 30% of their wells.  This leads to less downtime and lost productivity, and more proactive solution implementation.

The second experience that is often shared with us is that our customers have more reliable forecasts and spend less time revising production expectations for their assets.  This allows better opportunities to hedge production, enter into sales contracts, and leverage their assets for project financing.