SPE’s Board of Directors has created a new Completions technical discipline, concluding that the interests of SPE professional members from the drilling and completions, and production and operations communities would be best served if completions became a separate technical discipline.
Currently, completions engineering has come to be regarded by the industry as a separate discipline in its own right, distinct from drilling, because of the increasing complexity of completions technologies and operations. In addition, the Production and Operations discipline definition includes some topics that are now often thought of as falling under the category of completions engineering, which has resulted in ambiguity about whether some activities should be classified as Drilling and Completions or Production and Operations. Drilling and Completions is the largest SPE technical discipline, comprising more than 25% of SPE professional members.
With the addition of Completions, SPE’s seventh technical discipline, changes will be seen across SPE’s programs and member benefits. SPE soon will be contacting members to allow them to update their member profiles and, if applicable, select a new preferred technical discipline.