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In this third column on emerging geographic frontiers, I want to focus on what may be the fastest developing country in the Eastern Hemisphere—politically, demographically, and certainly from the standpoint of upstream oil and gas.

Asia Pacific’s energy sector is on the brink of major change. New areas are opening to foreign investment, national oil companies are adopting more aggressive E&P strategies, and the supply/demand balance is shifting.

The use of moored, oceangoing “smart” buoys that can harvest energy from waves could be an efficient and economic means of supplying electric power for various offshore oil and gas operations, including well trees, monitoring systems, and autonomous underwater vehicles.

The world's first full-scale subsea gas compression system is the final stages of construction and is on schedule to be installed in the Åsgard gas field offshore Norway by year's end.

The oil and gas industry is a major driver of high-performance computing development, particularly for upstream seismic processing and permanent field monitoring. But exploration and production still lags behind other industries in the use of digitization.

Once again, we find ourselves in a time of extreme challenges on many fronts in the arena of well construction, with corresponding needs for technological advancements.

Drilling horizontal infill wells in the Pierce field in the UK central North Sea is challenging because of a narrow drilling window caused by depletion in a highly fractured reservoir.

Casing drilling is a method by which the well is drilled and cased simultaneously.

Managed-pressure drilling (MPD) has been used in Vietnam since 2007 to address a number of drilling and reservoir challenges.

In 2011, the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) considered enhancement of equipment specifications for deep drilling rigs to integrate state-of-the-art technologies.