Saudi Aramco

Top industry professionals will be honored this week for their significant contributions to the oil and gas industry.

The load-out of a jacket for the Safaniya oil field marks the first jacket delivered to Saudi Aramco from McDermott’s recently opened Dammam fabrication yard.

At IHS CERAWeek, Saudi Arabian Energy Minster Khalid A. Al-Falih and Pemex Director General José Antonio González Anaya expressed cautious optimism for the short-term outlook.

Early testing suggests that grains of proppant so small they need to be measured in microns can add production by slowing the notoriously rapid declines in unconventional wells.

Although Saudi Arabia has plenty of sand, it took some ingenuity by Saudi Aramco and Schlumberger to figure out how to use it effectively as proppant.

A number of ongoing industry research projects are developing nanoparticles that work at the reservoir level and for fluid treatment. Though they may be a few years away from finalization, these efforts highlight nanotechnology’s increasingly sophisticated and growing application scope.

For nearly a decade, Saudi ­Aramco has been studying how altering the chemical makeup of seawater injected into its reservoirs can increase production. The result is "smart water" that can boost the sweep effectiveness of a waterflood.

As the drilling industry improves its efforts to capture drilling operation activities in real time, it has generated a significant amount of data that drilling engineers cannot process on their own.

With more wells to check than tools and time to do so, a methodology to predict wells with the highest risk of corrosion was developed.

At the SPE Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference, one of the most innovative ideas discussed was a liquid proppant designed to turn into strong spherical balls to keep a fracture open.