Equinor and Applied Petroleum Technology (APT) have joined forces in a research and development (R&D) project that aims to replace costly downhole sampling and logging with more cost-efficient solutions.
“How can we extract more relevant information that helps operators find and produce more oil and gas despite having access to fewer data sources?” asked Helge Nyrønning, the CEO of APT. “This is the challenge we aim to solve together with Equinor.”
The oil and gas industry’s drive to reduce both its cost level and climate gas emissions has resulted in continued pressure to reduce the cost and scope of data acquisition programs. This pressure creates a need for methods that more-effectively provide insight into the character of petroleum fluids in the absence of downhole samples.
APT and Equinor will cooperate to extract more information from reduced data-acquisition programs. The joint R&D project will use geochemical analysis to extract the required information from reduced data sets and enable operators to replace acquisition programs such as downhole fluid sampling, production logging, or wireline logging with more robust and cost-efficient solutions.
“Equinor’s ambition is to reduce its groupwide emissions by 50% by 2030, and we aim to realize 90% of this ambition by absolute reductions,” said Vibeke Haugen, Equinor’s technology manager. “Extracting more data from current sources without having to execute more downhole operations could be one way of reducing both emission levels and operating costs.”
The project involves developing and testing analytical instrumentation, executing and verifying experimental technologies, and deploying and optimizing tools. The work flow will allow APT and Equinor to answer fundamental questions related to whether the reservoir is oil or gas, what the quality of the petroleum in the reservoir is and how it varies, and which zones are contributing to production.
“The aim is to develop a methodology that allows engineers to deploy geochemical techniques to enhance understanding of hydrocarbon reservoirs using proxies that are less costly and easier to obtain than the downhole samples that have historically been used for exploration,” Nyrønning said.