The oil and gas industry is leveraging technology to increase competitiveness while addressing sustainability goals, supply-chain disruptions, and regulatory standards. During the past 3 years, over half a million patents were granted for production monitoring. This progress has led to a shift toward integrated work flows, cloud-based platforms, resilient sensors, process simplification, and automation.
These advancements aim to enhance reservoir understanding, simplify monitoring programs, and reduce costs. Next-generation technologies are being progressively implemented to automate processes, modernize operations, and boost efficiency and production while meeting sustainability requirements. Data-set integration is becoming the key for comprehensively understanding reservoir behavior, which, in combination with the use of artificial intelligence and hybrid modeling for production analysis, results in faster informed decision-making.
The following are some examples of advances in the past year:
- Increased use of cloud-based platforms providing real-time data access, data visualization, analysis, and modeling and enabling remote operations
- New sensors with improved reliability able to operate in previously inaccessible environments showcased with promising results (e.g., clap-on ultrasonic electromagnetic multiphase meter, sensor ball)
- Downhole monitoring with tracers used to support well-cleanup operations and increase zonal productivity
- Innovative solutions to gather flow-profile information in challenging areas, such as the use of distributed temperature and acoustic sensing with thermal modeling in high-temperature wells
- Crosswell strain and production-profile interference testing in the Permian region, offering a holistic approach to reservoir monitoring through insights into fracture network dynamics at low cost and low risk
- New rapid solutions for production analysis from multitransverse wells providing key fracture and reservoir properties
- Advanced logging tools, such as the flow array sensing tool, successfully used in complex wells with high gas-to-liquid ratios
Overall, these advancements have improved our understanding of reservoir behavior, optimized production efficiency, and contributed to the goal of achieving a sustainable energy future.
This Month’s Technical Papers
Near-Real-Time Tracer Data Optimizes Well Cleanups in the Nova Field
Slickline-Deployed Fiber-Optic Cable Provides First Production Profile for High-Temperature Gas Well
Crosswell Strain and Production-Interference Testing Integrated in the Permian Basin
Mariela Araujo, SPE, is a principal science expert at Shell Global Solutions, currently in the role of commercial innovation partnerships manager. Before taking this role, she held roles in technology development for production optimization, reservoir management, and subsurface integration. Araujo holds BS and PhD degrees in physics and has been working in the industry as a reservoir engineer with a focus on a variety of technology areas covering applications from the laboratory to the field. She is passionate about data integration, subsurface modeling, and optimization and has worked for oil and gas projects in Venezuela, the UK, the US, Canada, and Jordan. Currently, Araujo is supporting several technology programs, including asset management and offshore technologies, CO2 abatement, and electrification initiatives.