Monthly Features

For the entities formerly—and, sometimes, still—known as oilfield service companies, the energy transition presents new business challenges and opportunities. How are they managing?

The recent cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline’s IT system has thrust the issue of oil and gas industry cybersecurity into the spotlight, which, according to specialists in the field, is where it should always be.

When fracturing, simply shooting all the perforations at the same spot in the casing can offer increased production at a low cost.

This study in a shale-oil formation quantified the hydraulic fracture propagation process and described the fracture geometry by developing a geomechanical forward model and a Green’s function-based inversion model for low-frequency distributed acoustic sensing data interpretation, substantially enhancing the value of the LF-DAS data in the process.

“What is the drilling state” has become an important question among data scientists and automation experts. The simplest definition of a complicated concept is that it is what the driller is doing at the time.

Case studies demonstrate how an autonomous outflow-control device prevents growth and excessive fluid injection into thief/fracture zones and maintains a balanced or prescribed injection distribution.

Can a camera on the drill floor, or one on a mobile phone, measure what is going on during drilling or evaluate drill-bit wear more consistently than a human?

When Hess, Halliburton, and Nabors sat down to create a single plan to stream on the driller’s display, they needed to work out a lot of differences, including the definition of the word "activity."

It won’t happen overnight, but a growing number of US shale players are taking important steps to bring more automation and stage-level decision making to the hydraulic fracturing process in tight reservoirs.

As European majors push hard and fast to decarbonize energy and move into new and renewable sources, US majors are focusing on cleaner, more efficient hydrocarbons. Which approach and which companies will gain the upper hand?