R&D/innovation
Findings from two new SPE papers argue that the tight-rock sector needs to rethink longstanding assumptions about how hydraulic fractures form underground.
The newest recipient of the title SPE Legend of Hydraulic Fracturing talks about his career, the evolution of fracture stimulation, the development of increasingly useful simulators, and the future of the oil and gas industry. The honor was given at the 2026 SPE Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference and Exhibition.
SLB's and Baker Hughes' partnerships with NVIDIA and Google Cloud, respectively, will develop advanced AI-enabled power optimization and sustainability solutions for the global data center sector.
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The ATCE Startup Village is a partnership between SPE and the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Rice University. Find out which firms took this year's top honors during the annual competition. -
The Biden administration seeks to cut the cost of enhanced geothermal systems by 90% by 2035.
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An automated detection application helped identify stringers early for an operator of a mature field in the North Sea while drilling multilateral wells through reservoir sections containing hard calcite stringers interspersed in sand formations with low unconfined compressive strength. The application guided drilling decisions that minimized invisible lost time and sh…
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While small modular reactors open doors to affordable, carbon-free nuclear power, they also raise new questions over waste disposal.
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New Fortress Energy again taps the engineering giant for one of its modular LNG plants, this one using fixed platforms.
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Plenary panelists at URTeC offer possibilities as society looks to bridge today’s reality of hydrocarbon usage with tomorrow’s promise of carbon-free energy.
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Drilling automation champions met to identify where this emerging technology needs to be by the end of the decade. What they ended up agreeing on most was that the business models used today are largely incompatible with the technology of the future.
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Seven years, and we’re on track to exceed the 1.5°C target established by the Paris Agreement in 2015 to limit global warming by 2030. Instead, we may be turning up the heat to 3.0°C. And in this case, doubling the wager does not hold potential for greater rewards. A recent report addressed the costs of technologies for emissions mitigation and their likelihood of mak…
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A team of engineers did something no one had done before: a full-scale fracturing test on the surface. The results surprised the fracturing experts involved.
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The message from a single chart’s data from the first full-scale hydraulic fracturing surface test is simple: Far less proppant flows out of the first clusters passed in a stage than the last ones.
