Abstract
Technology Focus When reading professional papers, I notice that our profession is innovating more and more. This trend is related to the increasingly difficult challenges we must accept. Safety—We are facing more dangers while keeping the risk much lower than before: high-pressure gas fields, very harsh environment, and others. Environmental issues—Under pressure from authorities, and our conscience that we cannot leave a sea to our children in which they would not dare to swim, we are now applying a very strict control of our wastes. Colleagues of geosciences—Wells are proposed that encounter greater difficulties. We are running sensitive operations, in complex geological contexts, where the problems are met from the seabed to the targets. Human resources—We face cyclic activity in which recruitment goes up and down, with no time to train workers correctly in periods of high activity, and no money to train them in slow times. In such a changing context, we must do our best to have an efficient transmission of experience and know-how between the elders and the young recruits, but often we must sacrifice this aspect to immediate needs or constraints. Economical challenge—We must deal with external events, which makes real stabilization of our activity impossible, and we must control costs in any circumstances: either when activity level is increasing, and dragging along the costs toward unthinkable peaks; or when it is decreasing, with the oil price making projects less economical, forcing us into difficult cost-cutting exercises. This trend toward increasing complexity is not new, but it is accelerating. As engineers, our best answers to these new challenges are innovation and boldness. Last year was an Olympic year: like high-level sportsmen, we shall, day after day, surpass ourselves to manage our operations "Citius, Altius, Fortius." Offshore Drilling and Completion additional reading available at the SPE eLibrary: www.spe.org SPE 115058 • "Case Study: Restoring Sand-Prone Subsea Wells to Production" by M. Vazir, BP plc, et al. SPE 115698 • "Development and Installation of a Triple Wellhead on the Britannia Platform" by A. Elizabeth Matheson, SPE, ConocoPhillips, et al. SPE 113701 • "Optimized Recovery From the Fram Øst Development Through Extreme-Well Design" by Arve K. Thorsen, SPE, Baker Hughes, et al. Additional reading available at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org OTC 19307 • "Drilling Through Bitumen in the Gulf of Mexico: the Shallower vs. the Deeper" by Gang Han, Hess Corporation, et al.
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