Offshore Technology Report

Close-tolerance liner drilling for deepwater applications. A joint company effort involving ConocoPhillips, Baker Hughes and Tesco has been studying and testing new tools and techniques for making a patented Close-Tolerance Liner Drilling (CTLD) system practical for improving the drilling and completion of deepwater wells. Results of development and evaluation through lab studies and onshore well testing to date is discussed and illustrated.

Deep gas on the Gulf of Mexico Shelf. Anadarko Petroleum Corp. uses examples from two GOM shelf projects to discuss the potential and challenge of the MMS' royalty relief program to promote deep gas recovery from the already well-drilled shallow water Shelf area. Maximum depths in such projects are pushing 25,000 ft, from 15,000 to 17,000-ft depths of 10 years ago, and commercial sands are being found.

 Oil Country Tubular Goods

Advanced drillstring inspection improves pipe rating and therefore, deepwater drilling performance. Drilling deep wells in deep water with standard rig inventory was not possible using existing drillstring inspection and ratings. BP explains how applying advanced Ultrasonic Inspection and detailed pipe-wall mapping from Technical Industries proved the drillstring to a higher standard, contributing to a successful drilling campaign.

Supply chain logistics management. Managing tubular supply – including casing and tubing – is a logistical headache for oil companies. It is also crucial for efficient use of equipment and manpower. The last things that an operator wants are people and rigs waiting on pipe. But it happens all too often. In a non-technical management article, Tenaris describes how it is managing the total logistics and supply of tubulars for major field operations, including clients Kerr McGee and ConocoPhillips.

Building on last year's successful 10-page compilation of expandable technology, World Oil provides an update of what's new in expandable technology from the major service providers, plus a status report on the dream of the monobore.

Acceptance of composite tubulars is growing in the oil and gas industry. In light of increasingly widespread application and a new draft standard, wide-ranging applications for these materials abound: from pipe work and pipelines to caissons, pressure vessels and storage tanks; from external and internal corrosion or damage to up-rating for loads or pressure; or through-wall defects repair to strengthening of embrittled duplex. Uses such as these are described through actual field examples, including clients Shell Expro, Statoil, Amerada Hess and others. Authored by FD Alliance, an alliance between Furmanite Int'l and DML Composites. Furmanite is an international organization headquartered in Dallas. DML Composites is part of the DML Group, majority-owned by Halliburton KBR, as well as Weir Group and Balfour Beatty.

 Completion Methods

Avoiding proppant flowback in tight gas completions with improved fracture design. Since the late 1940s, there have been more than 1 million fracturing treatments in the US. After each well is treated and cleaned up, any flowback of proppant from a fracture-treated formation is highly undesirable. Engineers at El Paso Production and Texas A&M University incorporated a stability analysis of the proppant pack while designing hydraulic fracturing treatments. They reviewed prediction methods and analyzed proppant flowback patterns in 24 South Texas tight gas completions. They concluded that the predictive powers of available models are not satisfactory. Instead, the authors discuss a method to predict proppant flowback and propose a model that shows reasonable agreement with laboratory and field data.

Turbulence effects and their reduction in high-permeability gas wells. The most obvious feature and production impediment to any natural gas well is turbulence, which becomes increasingly the dominant factor as the well's deliverability increases. For reservoirs with high permeability, turbulence overwhelms nearly all other factors, including damage. Authors from BP and M. J. Economides of the University of Houston present new correlations to asses the impact of turbulence in higher permeability formations, the effect or perforation density and perforation configuration, and a comparison between vertical and horizontal wells in gas reservoirs. Field-working formulae are given.

 Petroleum Technology Digest (Production Technology)

Our popular, recurring feature, results from World Oil's association with the Petroleum Technology Transfer Council. This month features Horizontal waterflood project in Osage county, California. In a consortium effort led by PTTC's West Coast Region, operators contributed data on 127 wells in seven fields. Authors from Signal Hill Petroleum, Brea Canon Oil, Plains Exploration & Production and the University of Southern California discuss how to deal with the widespread and growing problem of increasing water production.

 Seismic Acquisition Advances

Comparison of acquisition techniques for transition zones. WesternGeco discusses the effects of boreholes verses rammed placement of charges, as well as seafloor hydrophones verses towed streamers versus vertical borehole arrays. Example results from a Middle East offshore transition zone are presented.

 Deepwater Focus

Deepwater tie-backs/ gathering systems. At Falcon field, discovered in 2001, in 3,450 ft of water in the US Gulf of Mexico, the operator solved the dilemma of how to develop this promising, dry gas find by tying it into a new host platform, 33 miles away in 390 ft of water. As told by Pioneer Natural Resources, just before Falcon's first production, the Harrier discovery was made, and this field was subsequently tied back to the new platform. Two additional discoveries (Tomahawk and Raptor) were made during Harrier's development. Good forethought in the initial Falcon phase, including an expandable infrastructure and a sound, project execution strategy, has made Tomahawk and Raptor viable deepwater projects that otherwise might not have been developed.