automation

A new spread of stimulation equipment from the world’s largest service company demonstrates the latest significant step to creating a more automated oilfield.

Many column inches are filled with discussion of how companies need to operate in the lower-for-longer market that the upstream oil and gas industry continues to face.

The tedium of identifying small faults in often murky seismic images pushed Dustin Dewett, an associate geophysicist for BHP Billiton, to develop a better way to use the tools at hand.

The Samarang oil field, offshore Sabah, Malaysia, is undergoing a redevelopment project with integrated operations. Several work flows were designed and deployed in order to achieve an early milestone of providing real-time well-performance monitoring, surveillance, and optimization.

On the basis of safety performance results achieved through automation downstream, an operator set out to achieve the same advances in its upstream business.

The drilling-systems-automation roadmap (DSA-R) initiative is a cross-industry effort launched in June 2013 to help accelerate the adoption of advancements in drilling-systems automation (DSA) for both onshore and offshore wells.

Case studies from around the world prove that big rewards await companies that optimize the artificial lift systems keeping their mature fields alive. The success stories involve a mix of monitoring, automation, and performance tracking.

Saudi Aramco is on a mission to increase the amount of seismic data that it collects by fourfold, while reducing costs and acquisition time by half of what it spends today.

Robotic submarines, capable of operating by themselves thousands of feet underwater for months or perhaps years at a time, are under development as the vanguard of tomorrow’s subsea oil and gas fields.