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Expectations have continued to rise over recent years regarding how oil and gas projects and facilities analyze, manage, and communicate about their social and environmental performance. NGOs are among the most interested and active stakeholders, and increasingly they expect to be engaged.

Project management is one way to keep an eye on the big picture. Focusing on the little things too can increase your bottom line. The complexity of modern facilities construction projects necessitates a cradle-to-grave approach to managing projects over long periods of time.

Higher oil prices has created increased interest in chemical enhanced oil recovery (CEOR) using polymers, surfactants, and alkalis. This technology poses some special challenges, especially around water treatment.

The oil and gas industry is sometimes slow to adopt new technologies and other times quick to deploy a new approach. The decision whether to try something new weighs the perceived risks and rewards.

In spite of massive investments in project management best practices and the organizations to implement them, major oil and gas projects continue to experience cost overruns and schedule delays. A root cause that has not been sufficiently explored is the built-in bias toward overconfidence.

The challenges the industry faces are not only or even primarily technical—they have to do with how the industry sees and communicates with the public, and with demands from the public to have a voice in decision making. This article explores the barriers to engaging with the public.

Engineering culture is largely a safety culture. We have to assume that people will make a mistake and protect them from themselves through the way we design facilities.

Physical properties of crude oil, such as gravity, viscosity, and water density, drive the selection of technologies to be used for effective dehydration. For heavy crude oils, process temperature is often increased to lower viscosity, but there are limits, after which alternatives are needed.

Compared to the US industrial average downtime ranging from 3% to 5%, the oil and gas industry’s estimated downtime ranges from 5% to 10%,indicating that improvement is needed in reliability and maintenance of facilities, equipment, and processes.

This is the first of several articles on the subject of water management for unconventional hydraulic fracturing. This article outlines the critical issues and outlines development of a strategy for treatment of flowback fluids.