by Paul Siegele
As our industry drills deeper and farther for crude oil, the stakes of such projects are rising.
That's why I chaired a panel at the World Petroleum Congress to look at ways technology, science, partnership and ingenuity are helping Chevron develop ultra deep reservoirs.
The key, says my colleague Dave Rainey, vice president Gulf of Mexico Exploration for British Petroleum, is to use know-how and technology to better predict what is beneath the surface.
Taking into account factors like the spatial distribution of pressure and the movement of fluids through the history of a basin may help us to predict places where compaction or diagenesis are likely to occur.
Compaction is the consolidation of sediments, and diagenesis is the chemical alteration of pore spaces within a reservoir. Both are culprits that prevent crude oil from flowing freely, which can be disastrous when a firm has invested billions to develop an ultra-deep field.
Partnership is another important tool for managing the risks of ultra deep exploration. It not only helps to provide the massive investments these projects require, but it also lets partners share specialized knowledge. StatoilHydro has an agreement with Chevron in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, for example, under which a team comprised of technical staff from both companies work together on several deepwater fields. StatoilHydro and Devon Energy are investors along with Chevron in the Jack project in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. The Jack well test in 2006 set more than a half a dozen world records for equipment pressure, depth and duration in the deep water.
A third way to help make these projects more successful is through tools such as coring and computer modeling, which was discussed by panelist Randall Miller, whose firm Corelab conducts such analysis.
And panelist Anatoliy Dmitrievsky, director of the Institute of Oil and Gas of the Russian Academy of Sciences, presented a theory about the inorganic generation of oil in granite.
Many technical challenges still remain to be solved in ultra-deep projects, but the industry has the bright people needed to find solutions.
Blind Faith and Tahiti are two of our largest deepwater projects in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. Watch this video about the two projects.
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Posted July 04, 2008 03:54 | Back to Blog