JPT January 2022 Issue

The disruptive nature of unconventional reservoirs has spurred the need for new ideas. But that doesn’t always mean that we need to toss out the traditional methods that got us here. Such might be the case for the recent developments unfolding around the diagnostic fracture injection test (DFIT).

A rigless chemical frac-hit remediation process was designed to address the damage mechanisms of capillary phase trapping, reduced hydrocarbon relative permeability, paraffin deposition, and minor scale deposition.

Statistics are important in knowing where the sharp minds of SPE members are investing their energies. Typically, this is also in proportion to what those members need. Hence, it is noteworthy that more than a fifth of the papers were about CO2-based EOR, indicating not only renewed interest but also the motivation for carbon capture, use, and storage.

The highlight of this year’s feature on mature fields and well revitalization has been the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for analysis of mature assets. Many paper proposals studied using AI/ML techniques cover a wide range of topics including optimization of production operations, faster reservoir characterization of mature f…

Against a backdrop of global uncertainty and challenging economics, well integrity subject-matter experts have continued to prioritize human and environmental safety in production while pivoting their skills toward areas of growing importance such as carbon capture and sequestration. New technologies and simulation methods have allowed the authors of the three SPE pap…

This third installment of the Digital Data Acquisition Technology Focus will focus on computer vision for improved data acquisition. Computer vision is defined as a field of study that seeks to develop techniques to help computers “see” and understand the content of digital images such as photographs and videos.