Monthly Features

The promise of getting 30% more oil production from shale wells has set off a race by companies trying to see if they can replicate what EOG has done. But the big question is: Can it add enough oil to increase the industry’s low average recovery rate?

Tiny soil samples may contain as many as 300,000 species of microbial life, but a Netherlands-based startup has figured out that between 50 and 200 of them can tell an operator if a drilling location will hold oil and gas reserves.

To reduce the risk of wells getting “frac hits,” Permian Basin operators around Midland created an information exchange to give them notice of nearby fracturing.

No longer considered a buzz phrase, cloud computing has made converts of the largest oil companies, and now the smaller ones are next.

Faced with big potential discoveries under terrain that makes good seismic imaging impossible, Total is rethinking how to gather the data it needs, with an idea that could change the face of seismic exploration.

A type curve is a quick way to answer a critical question—what does a typical well produce over time in a given place?

Oil demand growth from the transportation sector, the linchpin of oil consumption, will slow to a trickle by 2035 and level off, while demand from the petrochemicals sector will become oil’s chief growth driver, the BP 2017 Energy Outlook says.

It is known that a well injecting a lot of water near a big fault can lead to earthquakes. The problem is, more often than not those faults are not known until after a tremor.

The Unconventional Resources Technology Conference included discussions on emerging approaches to improving oil and gas recovery from tight rocks and exploring where the risks still lie with induced seismicity.

PipeFractionalFlow, a spinoff startup from the University of Texas at Austin, uses new theories and equations to make modeling complex multiphase flow more affordable. A model recently developed offers operators an “independent and unbiased” way to validate the system and select candidate wells.