Since the last Reservoir Performance and Monitoring feature in 2017, the industry has continued to advance with innovation in technology and business models to drive sustainable change. Operators around the world have continued lowering production costs aggressively, and oilfield service companies have continued to survive by making a low-margin profit in a greatly competitive market. If the industry until recently was lamenting an oversupply of oil and that a global upstream investment slump caused a focus on incremental technology improvements with fewer capital resources and personnel, now a looming oil-supply shortage has reignited discussions about how innovation, digital technologies, and collaborations can accelerate future major project development.
In the last 12 months, 157 technical papers were presented at various conferences and meetings with reservoir performance and monitoring programs and were reviewed for this feature. For comparison, 160 were reviewed for the 2017 feature. Interestingly, 62 papers had first authors from academia, 70 from operating companies, and 25 from oilfield services companies and consulting firms. Sixty-three papers had authors with different affiliations.
The six papers selected and recommended as additional reading are a representative sample of the papers reviewed for this feature. They are a geographically diverse mix of fundamental research, industrial research and development, and field-application studies, reporting the latest published advances in reservoir-performance monitoring, analysis, and optimization.
In considering the 157 technical papers reviewed for this feature, I am looking forward to seeing how our industry is going to react through innovation and digital technologies to the supply and demand changes of coming years. A new era of operational efficiency improvements, improved recovery factors, and lower production costs from continuous reservoir performance monitoring, analysis, and optimization is ready to begin.
This Month's Technical Papers
Lessons From 10 Years of Monitoring With Chemical Inflow Tracers
Reservoir-Surveillance Data Creates Value in Fractured-Carbonate Applications
Knudsen-Like Scaling May Be Inappropriate for Gas Shales
Recommended Additional Reading
SPE 188890 Effect of Irreversible Retention on Tracer Deployments: Constraining Novel Material Deployments by Hsieh Chen, Aramco, et al.
SPE 189846 Applying Subsurface DNA Diagnostics and Data Science in the Delaware Basin by J. Silva, Anadarko, et al.
SPE 190480 Effect of Dilution on Acoustic and Transport Properties of Reservoir Fluid Systems by Ram R. Ratnakar, Shell, et al.
| Silviu Livescu, SPE, is the chief scientist in the global Coiled Tubing Research and Engineering Centre of Baker Hughes, a GE company, in Calgary, with fundamental- and applied-research, industrial-research-and-development, innovation, commercialization, and intellectual-property experience related to production engineering and reservoir engineering. He holds BS and MS degrees from Politehnica University of Bucharest in Romania and a PhD degree from the University of Delaware, all in mechanical engineering. Livescu is an SPE Distinguished Lecturer for 2018–19, an executive editor for the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, and an associate editor for SPE Journal. He serves on the SPE Production and Facilities Advisory Committee, the SPE Management and Information Advisory Committee, and the JPT Editorial Committee. Livescu can be reached at https://ca.linkedin.com/in/silviu-livescu-14a96735. |
