Technology Focus: Reservoir Performance and Monitoring (September 2018)

Abstract

Technology Focus Since the last Reservoir Performance and Monitoring feature in 2017, the industry has continued to advance with innovation in technology and business models to drive sustainable change. Operators around the world have continued lowering production costs aggressively, and oilfield service companies have continued to survive by making a low-margin profit in a greatly competitive market. If the industry until recently was lamenting an oversupply of oil and that a global upstream investment slump caused a focus on incremental technology improvements with fewer capital resources and personnel, now a looming oil-supply shortage has reignited discussions about how innovation, digital technologies, and collaborations can accelerate future major project development. In the last 12 months, 157 technical papers were presented at various conferences and meetings with reservoir performance and monitoring programs and were reviewed for this feature. For comparison, 160 were reviewed for the 2017 feature. Interestingly, 62 papers had first authors from academia, 70 from operating companies, and 25 from oilfield services companies and consulting firms. Sixty-three papers had authors with different affiliations. The six papers selected and recommended as additional reading are a representative sample of the papers reviewed for this feature. They are a geographically diverse mix of fundamental research, industrial research and development, and field-application studies, reporting the latest published advances in reservoir-performance monitoring, analysis, and optimization. In considering the 157 technical papers reviewed for this feature, I am looking forward to seeing how our industry is going to react through innovation and digital technologies to the supply and demand changes of coming years. A new era of operational efficiency improvements, improved recovery factors, and lower production costs from continuous reservoir performance monitoring, analysis, and optimization is ready to begin. Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org. SPE 188890 Effect of Irreversible Retention on Tracer Deployments: Constraining Novel Material Deployments by Hsieh Chen, Aramco, et al. SPE 189846 Applying Subsurface DNA Diagnostics and Data Science in the Delaware Basin by J. Silva, Anadarko, et al. SPE 190480 Effect of Dilution on Acoustic and Transport Properties of Reservoir Fluid Systems by Ram R. Ratnakar, Shell, et al.