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Contents
4 
President’s Column with Terry Palisch—
Volume 75 | Number 9

Creating Our Energy Future

In this inaugural podcast episode and transcript, Terry Palisch, who will
officially begin his 2024 SPE Presidency in October, discussed his views of
the challenges facing our industry and SPE members, his outlook for our
industry, and what his goals will be during his presidency.

12 
GUEST EDITORIAL • Brownfield Optimization—
The Key To Unlocking Sustainable Oil and Gas?
While innovative solutions are being examined for decarbonization, there
is one topic which is rarely emphasized as a key driver in the path toward
a more-sustainable future—brownfield optimization.

20 
Are We There Yet? Tight-Oil Producers Still Chipping
Away at Parent-Child Problems
New studies are a reminder that the effort to identify, classify, and nullify
frac hits remains paramount to the future of the unconventionals business.
On the cover: Price tag, oil demand
28 
Test Shows Fracturing Can Also Create Underground expected to scuttle newbuild deepwater
rig plans. Source: Transocean.
Water Heating Systems
Fervo Energy’s bet that fracturing methods can be used for geothermal
power is looking like a winner.
DEPARTMENTS
36 
Hurdles Will Keep Deepwater Rig Fleet Size in Check
The heated global floating rig market has day rates for high-end units 10 Comments
climbing over a half million dollars and toward a newbuild cycle that will
15 E&P Notes
(likely) never come.
101 SPE Technical Papers
42 
TotalEnergies Drills Lebanon’s Qana Prospect Amid Available
New Global Interest in EastMed Gas
Lebanon hopes to join the club of EastMed gas producers as TotalEnergies 102 SPE News
and its partners spud an appraisal well near Beirut’s maritime border with 103 People
Israel where gas is already being produced. 104 SPE Events
48 
Conductor-Integrity Monitoring in Subsea Wells
in Harsh Environments
Over a 10-year period, sensors monitoring the motion and loads near
subsea wellheads have been mounted on more than 300 drilling
campaigns. Integrity parameters were calculated to assess whether
subsea conductors provided the intended amount of support during
drilling operations.

An Official Publication of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Published in US. Copyright 2023, Society of Petroleum Engineers.
 Recent Content from
SPE’s Journals
To view these papers, go to
OnePetro, www.onepetro.org,
and search by title or paper
number or navigate to the journal.
Technology Focus
The complete SPE technical papers featured in this issue are available

SPE JOURNAL
free to SPE members for 2 months at jpt.spe.org.

SPE-215844-PA—Integrating Embedment 52 RESERVOIR SURVEILLANCE

and Creep Behavior for Multisize Proppant
in Shale: Conceptual Model and Validation
SPE-212542-PA—Evaluating the
Sealing Performance of Plug and
Abandonment Cement Systems
Under Downhole Conditions
SPE-215842-PA—A Deep-Learning-
Based Graph Neural Network-Long-
Short-Term Memory Model for
Reservoir Simulation and Optimization
With Varying Well Controls
Muhammad Navaid Khan, SPE, Senior Specialist for Advanced
Reservoir Solutions, ADNOC
54 
Study Reviews Two Decades of Surveillance Using Distributed
Acoustic Sensing
58 Unconventional Use of Tracer Technology Provides Flow Insights
for EOR, IOR
61 Focused Reservoir Fluid Sampling Uses Artificial Intelligence
Technology

SPE PRODUCTION
& OPERATIONS 64 FIELD DEVELOPMENT
Reza Garmeh, SPE, Reservoir Engineering Adviser, Callon Petroleum
SPE-215846-PA—New Hybrid
MCDM Approach for an Optimal 66 
Machine Learning, Numerical Simulation Integrated To Estimate
Selection of Maintenance Strategies:
Results of a Case Study Child-Well Depletion

SPE-215849-PA—Study on the 70 Machine Learning Helps Customize Spacing for Maximum

Synthesis and Properties of a New Acreage Value
Salt-Resistant Drag Reducer
73 Study of Permian Basin Provides Insight Into
SPE DRILLING
& COMPLETION
Parent-/Child-Well Interactions

SPE-215836-PA—Improvements in
Drilling Fluid Rheology Predictions
Using Rotational Viscometer
SPE-212912-PA—Applications
of Machine Learning Methods to
Predict Hole Cleaning in Horizontal
and Highly Deviated Wells
SPE-212377-PA—The Effect of
Casing Ovality on Fracture Plug
Sealing Element Performance
77 OFFSHORE FACILITIES
Graham Collier, SPE, Consultant
79 
Study Compares Fixed Wind Architectures for Offshore Green
Hydrogen Production
82 Qualification Approach Detailed for Offshore Hydrogen
Pipeline Systems
85 Potential Revealed for Hydrogen Production From Offshore
Wind in Uruguay

SPE RESERVOIR EVALUATION

& ENGINEERING
SPE-215835-PA—Comparative Evaluation
of a Functions for the Soave-Redlich-
Kwong Equation of State and the
Peng-Robinson Equation of State to
Predict Saturation Pressures for Gas(es)-
Heavy Oil/Bitumen-Water Systems
SPE-217428-PA—The Best Scenario
for Geostatistical Modeling of Porosity
in the Sarvak Reservoir in an Iranian
Oil Field, Using Electrofacies, Seismic
Facies, and Seismic Attributes
SPE-215832-PA—Determination of
Concentration-Dependent Effective
Diffusivity of Each Gas Component of a
Binary Mixture in Porous Media Saturated
with Heavy Oil under Reservoir Conditions
88 OILFIELD CHEMISTRY
Michael Fuller, SPE, Senior Completions Subject-Matter Expert,
Chevron
90 
Geochemical Approaches Assist Production Allocation
of Commingled Fluids
94 Chemical and Carbon Isotope Composition Proves Effective
as Gas Diagnostic Tool
97 Reduced-Order Models Blend Chemistry, Machine Learning
for Water-Property Analysis
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SPE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

2023 President 2022 President

Motivate
Medhat M. Kamal Kamel Ben-Naceur
Chevron Fellow Emeritus Nomadia Energy
Consulting

2024 President
Terry Palisch
Secretary
Simon Seaton, Society
Inspire
Educate
CARBO Ceramics of Petroleum Engineers

Nominate
REGIONAL DIRECTORS
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ASIA PACIFIC NORTH AMERICA

Henricus Herwin, Pertamina Simeon Eburi, Chevron
Neil Kavanagh, Woodside Energy Robert Martinez, Titan Rock E&P
Deb Ryan, S&P Global Platts
EUROPE
Laura Precupanu, OMV Petrom RUSSIA AND THE CASPIAN Do you have colleagues who
Ignatiy Volnov, Lukoil
LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN are authorities in their fields and
Gail Ramdath, Tucker Energy Services
experienced public speakers?
TECHNICAL DIRECTORS If you do, consider nominating
COMPLETIONS DATA SCIENCE & ENGINEERING ANALYTICS one or more of them for the
Karen Olson, Olson Turner Enterprises Silviu Livescu, University of Texas at Austin

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Terry Palisch will take office as 2024 SPE President during the 2023 SPE Annual Technical Conference and
Exhibition in October. The following is a transcript of his podcast episode recorded with Pam Boschee,
SPE director of magazines, for this month’s Journal of Petroleum Technology.
In this inaugural podcast episode and transcript,
we discussed Palisch’s views of the challenges
facing our industry and SPE members, his outlook
for our industry, and what his goals will be during
his presidency.
Welcome to the Society of Petroleum Engineers
podcast with 2024 President Terry Palisch. I’m Pam
Boschee, director of SPE magazines, and Terry joins
me today to share his thoughts about being named
president with the official passing of the baton
from 2023 President Med Kamal at our Annual
Technical Conference and Exhibition (ATCE) in
San Antonio in October.
Terry is the vice president of technology and
engineering at Carbo Ceramics in Richardson,
Texas. He began his career with Arco during
which he served 10 years in Alaska and 4 years
as a senior petroleum engineering advisor in
Algeria. He joined Carbo in 2004, and in his
current position leads a team of technologists
developing and championing new products and
services and advising clients in completion and
fracture optimization.
He has been an SPE member for more than
40 years, serving in various roles including past
4 JPT | September 2023
▼
chairman of the SPE Dallas Section. He has been
the past chair of the ATCE technical program and
the former SPE Completions Technical Director.
He is an SPE Distinguished Member and received
the award for Distinguished Service as well as
the SPE Mid-Continent Regional Completions
Optimization and Technology Award and the
Regional Service Award. In 2013 he was named
one of the top 15 best engineers by the Texas
Independent Producers and Royalty Owners
Association, and in 2015 he was named the
SPE Dallas Section Engineer of the Year. He has
authored more than 50 SPE technical papers and
holds several patents.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in petroleum
engineering from the University of Missouri
Rolla, now the Missouri University of Science
and Technology, and was recently recognized
as a distinguished alumnus.
Welcome Terry, it’s a pleasure to talk with
you today.
Thank you Pam, it’s fun to be with you. I’m excited
to kick off this series, and hopefully, the members
will find it useful. Again, I’m excited to be here and
talk to you.
To help our members learn a bit about you
and about your background, let’s begin with
key issues you’ll emphasize as the 2024 SPE
President. You’ve selected “Creating Our
Energy Future” as your theme. Can you tell
us about it?

Great question. Over the course of the last

8 months or so, as incoming president, I’ve
had the distinct privilege to meet with multiple
sections and student chapters. I’ve seen
celebrations, such as leading opening sessions
at SPE/IADC International Drilling Conference
and Exhibition’s 50th anniversary, and hosted
awards presentations.
One of the things really exciting to me is that
our members and our students are excited about
the petroleum engineering profession, and they’re
excited about our industry. But at the same time,
they also recognize that as things change, oil and
gas is going to be critical to the future. They want
to know what their place is going to be, particularly
the younger members, and where we are headed.
I chose “Creating Our Energy Future” as my Missouri S&T presented the Award of Professional
theme. I thought about “your” and “mine,” but Distinction to Palisch in 2019.
it’s really “our” energy future. It has a twofold
meaning to me.
First, you and I and the membership The second part is SPE’s future, our future
want to create our energy future, we want to as as a society. So, of course, the SPE Board of
understand how we’re going to thrive and excel, Directors continues to work on that. Mark Rubin,
and how we can participate. We do that via our former CEO, set a wonderful foundation for us, and
SPE membership. now we have Simon Seaton coming on as our new
I liken SPE membership to a gym membership. CEO. I’m excited about where we go next—how we
It’s been very impactful to my professional continue to grow our membership, and how we
career, and I think that it’s important for the continue to meet our members’ needs. It’s going to
members to treat their SPE membership like a take not only our ideas, but it’s also going to take
gym membership. The gym offers many things, members’ ideas and input from everybody because
and you’re working on your personal well-being we are a member organization and member
and your health. Similarly, SPE allows you to society. We are here as SPE to meet the needs
work on your professional development and of the members.
professional well-being. To recap the intent of my theme, Creating
So, the first part of creating our energy future is Our Energy Future: How do we thrive in the
our future as members in the oil and gas industry industry, in our career, but then also how does
and how we can thrive, and how does SPE help. SPE move ahead.

jpt.spe.org 5

2018 SPE President Darcy Spady presents the
Distinguished Member Award.
Along the lines of looking toward the energy
future, another component is that the SPE
Board of Directors approved our Strategic Plan
this past January. It also looks ahead at SPE’s
role in approaching the future and the industry.
Could you share a bit about the process behind
developing it and some of the key takeaways?
For those who aren’t aware, every 3 to 5 years the
Board and senior staff develop a strategic plan,
reassessing the industry and SPE’s role in it.
This particular plan was started in roughly
Q3/Q4 last year, and towards the end of the
year and beginning of 2023, we rolled it out.
The process starts with an assessment of the
current environment—and not just the current
environment we’re in, but also the current
environment that the members find themselves
in. Quite a bit of data gathering and information
gathering from the membership takes place.
This time around, we found members are
concerned about five things. First, how are we as
technologists going to continue to produce more
and more oil and gas that’s going to be needed?
6 JPT | September 2023
Second, how are we going to implement new
technologies … what are the new technologies
that will help us do that? Third, what is our place
in the energy transition? Fourth, how do we
continue to attract students and others to our
profession? And fifth, concerns over our industry’s
image with the public.
Nothing was surprising, and maybe some of
it’s not even new, but it’s always good to ground
yourself in the context of the current environment.
From there, we developed and looked at the
mission. Do our mission, vision, and core values
still in place meet the needs of the members?
We made a reasonable modification to our
mission this year. Last time we went through
this process, we added a few words; this year we
somewhat reorganized, but it’s still generally the
same. We remain committed to disseminating
technical information and helping our members
excel in their profession.
And then finally, the meat of the Strategic Plan
becomes identifying the goals and the objectives
for implementing our goals. We identified our
key stakeholders, and the goals have to be
associated with them. Those key stakeholders
are our members first and foremost, but also
our member’s companies, our sponsors and
advertisers, our educators, our academia, and
then lastly, our external stakeholders.
As we put together our goals, we have those
stakeholders in mind. I’m not going to go through
all the goals, but each of the goals has objectives
that were identified as critical and that need
to be done now. Others were to be done soon,
and then intermediate to be done later. We are
actually in the middle of working through the
implementation of the action items as we speak,
and we will continue to be working on them. Again,
it’s a 5-year plan, so it will continue to evolve over
time. In the end, it’s the SPE side of Creating Our
Energy Future.
And I’d like to add here that the Strategic Plan
is available on the SPE website for anyone who
would like to read more about it.
Terry, what would you say to a student who
asks, “Why should I go into the oil and gas
industry?” or “Why should I go into the energy
industry?” You have weathered many up and
down cycles over your years in the industry …
what would you have to offer to a student’s
question about that?
Great question. First, I would say that every year
our world sets new records for energy usage. We
continue to grow the amount of energy that we
need, and that’s going to continue to grow. We
have continuing pressure for more energy as the
population increases, as the underdeveloped
world advances, and as the developing countries
continue to grow. As they strive to meet the energy
needs of their populations, energy needs are going
to continue to grow, and currently 80% of the
energy is provided from fossil fuels. That number
has been pretty constant over the past decades,
and it’s really not going to change anytime soon.
In fact, if you look at various projections, you’ll
see that the incremental energy needed is going
to be supplied by renewables and non-oil and gas,
non-fossil fuels, but fossil fuels will still be providing
the baseload need. Oil and gas are going to be
critical for the future.
That said, we have to be able to not only
provide affordable and reliable energy, but also
decarbonized. So, there’s the opportunity for our
industry, and as I talk to young students and young
members, I try to explain to them that they are
the future. Those entering our workforce need to
understand how to stay abreast of the changing
technologies, whether it’s in oil and gas extraction
or decarbonization.
It’s important to do that, and I hope they’ll
see that their SPE membership and its offerings
can help them meet those needs. They may not
need to be experts in everything, but SPE enables
them to understand enough about topics that
are important to our day and give them a better
understanding about deploying some of these
other technologies.
Celebrating the Ecuador Section’s 30th anniversary at
the Awards Banquet with the Minister of Energy in 2022.
I think that’s the advice I’d give. I try to
encourage everybody to do four things: learn,
participate, volunteer, and lead. Learn as much
as you can, whether it’s papers or attending
conferences or webinars. Participate in your local
section. Volunteer. You’ll find if you do those things,
you’ll find yourself leading, which is what I got out
of SPE, as well.
Thank you for that. What other thoughts would
you like to share, perhaps some points that
we haven’t touched on that are particularly
important to you or that you would like to
emphasize to the membership, our students,
and our younger members, too?
Let me start by going back to the gym membership
analogy. We all get different things out of SPE. If we
go back to my career and what I’ve gotten out of
SPE, it’s been critical not only for the technical side
of things and learning and improving my technical
expertise, but it’s also been important to my soft
skills. Writing papers, presenting papers, being a
leader, and volunteering have all helped me.
I’d like to tell younger members that while we
all would like to be CEO someday, we’re not all
going to be. For me, SPE has provided professional
jpt.spe.org 7

Presenting the Oklahoma City Section Gala Fundraiser
welcome address in February 2023.
development. I was leading the Dallas Section long
before I was a vice president at Carbo. And I think
that those experiences have helped me.
Going back to the gym membership, I think we
joined health clubs probably early in our lives for
fun and later in life because the doctor told us we
had to. Regardless, we do that for multiple reasons.
I might go to the spin class, someone might go to
swim or to a yoga class, but the bottom line is we’re
doing it for physical well-being.
I tend to think treating your SPE membership
in the same way is what I want to impress upon
people over the next months as we record these
episodes. As you progress in your professional
career, there are existing SPE offerings, and
probably some that we haven’t even thought
of yet, that will help you with your career.
For example, early in my career I went to a few
section meetings here and there. I went to topical
conversations that I thought were important to
me. As I began to grow and started attending more
conferences and writing papers, I started realizing
8 JPT | September 2023
how much that helped me technically, but also it
helped me learn how to present. It made me learn
how to write technically. When I came to Carbo,
I realized that it’s important to meet clients, go
to exhibitions, and be involved in advertising. So,
SPE’s value became something a little bit different
to me then.
As I worked through that and became a
member of the Dallas Section, quite frankly,
somebody came to me and asked if I would be
interested in serving on a committee. Of course, I
said yes, because it’s hard to say no in person, and
before you know it, I was the section chair, which
then led to other opportunities.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line
is these are the kinds of things that I think
help you personally, and that’s what I hope we
can learn more about in the future on these
recordings—talking about some of the things that
members may not realize SPE offers, and which
may specifically help their career, as it helped
my career.
Thank you, Terry, for giving us a glimpse of your
own career, your experience, and your experience
over the years with SPE.
Terry will be doing monthly podcast episodes
which you can find with transcripts on SPE’s
Journal of Petroleum Technology website and in
the monthly digital edition of JPT available on the
1st of each month.
In October’s episode, Terry, I believe you
will share your thoughts about the evolution of
the energy transition, what does the future of
petroleum engineering look like, and how does
SPE fit in.
I’m looking forward to it, and I just want to again
thank everybody—the members and volunteers.
I can’t tell you how excited I am when I meet
people out in the industry and in our Society, and
I hope that you will continue to volunteer and that
together we can continue to create your and our
energy future. JPT
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 COMMENTS
Join Us at ATCE
in San Antonio
Pam Boschee
JPT Managing Editor
We’re looking forward to attending the SPE
Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition
(ATCE) next month in San Antonio, Texas, at the
Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center. It kicks off
with the opening general session, “Expanding the
Opportunities to Sustainably Fuel the World,” on
Monday, 16 October. The offerings in a roster of
45 technical sessions begin Monday afternoon
and continue through Wednesday.
More than 15 pre-conference training
courses are available, 1-day courses on
15 and 19 October and 2-day courses on
14 and 15 October. All will take place at the
convention center meeting rooms and tickets
must be purchased separately. Discounted
pricing for advance registration is available until
14 September. Participants receive 0.8 Continuing
Education Units (CEUs) for 1-day courses and
1.6 CEUs for 2-day courses.
Special sessions are scheduled daily. Among
the topics on Monday is the 11th SPE Comparative
Solution Project (CSP). The call for participation
was announced in March at the 2023 SPE
Reservoir Simulation Conference. The goal is
to provide a common platform and reference
10 JPT | September 2023
case for numerical simulation of geological
carbon storage (GCS), specifically development
of simulations of realistic complexity. This session
will provide an overview of a recently completed
forecasting and validation study conducted on
a laboratory-scale proxy GCS system.
The annual PetroBowl championship
competition on 16 October pitches SPE student
chapter teams against each other in a series
of quick-fire rounds, answering technical
and nontechnical industry-related questions.
The contest has grown in size and popularity
since its debut in 2002, and in 2015 expanded
globally with the introduction of six regional
qualifier contests.
Regional qualifier competitions now take
place in the Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, South
America and Caribbean, Middle East, and
North America SPE regions, and the top 32 teams
are invited to the PetroBowl championship.
The Annual Awards Banquet on 17 October will
recognize our members who were selected as the
2023 SPE International Awards recipients.
The President’s Luncheon and Annual Meeting
of Members on 18 October will feature 2023 SPE
President Medhat Kamal’s “state of the Society”
presentation and conclude with President
Kamal passing the gavel to 2024 SPE President
Terry Palisch.
In this issue, JPT introduces President Palisch’s
inaugural podcast episode and transcript in
which he discusses the theme he has selected
for his presidency, “Creating Our Energy
Future.” He highlights the challenges facing
our industry and SPE members, his outlook for
 JPT EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD

our industry, and what his goals will be during Patrick Miller—Chairperson, Petronas
Imran Abbasy, Pakistan Petroleum
his presidency. He will be recording podcast
Anson Abraham, CNRL
episodes which you can find with transcripts in
Amir Alwazzan, Dragon Oil
the monthly digital editions of JPT and on the Mariela Araujo, Shell
JPT website. Jyotsna Asarpota, Halliburton
Also on 17 October, the Startup Village Elizabeth Barsotti, MRC Laboratory
Energy Startup Competition and the Competition Linda Battalora, Colorado School of Mines
Awards Ceremony will occur in person. The Zhiming Chen, China U. of Petroleum
Graham Collier, Consultant
competition will begin in the morning, and a
Santanu Das, ONGC
reception and award ceremony will take place
Sandeep Dhawan, WellPerform
in the afternoon.
Michael Fuller, Chevron
Be sure to visit the Exhibition Hall to learn Jeff Gagnon, ExxonMobil
about the latest technologies from a wide variety Reza Garmeh, Callon Petroleum
of companies. And swing by the SPE Pavilion, David Gurney, KUFPEC
booth 630, where you can learn more about SPE Subodh Gupta, Heretech Energy

with staff available to answer your questions. Dennis Harris, Chevron

Martin Hayes, Stanfield Consultants
Southwest Research Institute facilities (SwRI)
Hussein Hoteit, KAUST
is offering attendees a tour of its facilities on
Mehdi Izadi, ExxonMobil
19 October. SwRI is an independent, nonprofit Siddarth Jain, Sharjah NOC
research company headquartered in San Antonio Simon James, CS8 Consulting
with world-renowned test facilities and expertise Swathika Jayakumar, Core Laboratories
that have been used by the oil and gas industry Colin Johnston, Worldwide Oilfield Machine

for more than 75 years. Tour registration Muhammad Khan, ADNOC

Celestina Kissi, ChampionX
is required.
Mahdi Mahmoudi, Variperm
On the lighter side, when you’re ready for some
Swamy Margan, Baker Hughes
downtime, San Antonio offers many attractions Mark McClure, ResFRac
and restaurants. Sandeep Mukherjee, Callon
Before you go, take a look at the variety of Soujatya Mukherjee, Wintershall DEA
pre‑ATCE content available to watch on SPE Anand Nagoo, Nagoo and Associates
Energy Stream. For example, Lorenzo Simonelli, Gopi Nalla, DeGolyer and MacNaughton
Eudorah Ochai-Audu, Shell
chairman and CEO of Baker Hughes, shares
Danny Ochoa, Schlumberger
industry insights in an interview. Sushma Bhan,
Carlos Pedroso, Enauta
SPE Data Science and Engineering Analytics
Shahvir Pooniwala, Aramco
Technical Section chair, moderates a panel Kaibin Qiu, Schlumberger
discussion about generative AI and its value for Pierre Ramondenc, Schlumberger
the energy industry. Nayeem Chowdhury, head Michael Romer, ExxonMobil
of CCUS at Project Canary, discusses the enabling Babatunde Salawu, Shell
Débora Salomon, Dow
of startups and innovative entrepreneurs in oil and
Amit Singh, Chevron
gas with a panel of experts.
Victor Soriano, YPFB Chaco
Enjoy the show and your time in San Antonio! JPT
Cornelis (Kees) Veeken, Consultant
Larissa Walker, QGC
Junjie Yang, Baker Hughes
Karam Yateem, Saudi Aramco

jpt.spe.org 11
 GUEST EDITORIAL
Scott Benzie joined Coretrax
as chief technology officer in
2019 following its integration
with Mohawk Energy, which he
founded in 2004. Benzie has held
several design engineer roles at
major energy services companies
throughout his career. He has
extensive R&D experience, including
innovating groundbreaking tubular-
expansion technologies for drilling,
completion, and production
operations. He holds a bachelor’s
degree in mechanical engineering
from Heriot-Watt University, is
a chartered engineer, and holds
EUR ING status.
12 JPT | September 2023
Brownfield
Optimization
The Key To Unlocking
Sustainable Oil and Gas?
Scott Benzie, Chief Technology Officer, Coretrax
T
he topic of sustainability within the oil and gas industry has
dominated news agendas in recent years. As ‘Net Zero by
2050’ goals loom closer, the sector is under greater pressure
than ever to decarbonize operations and source oil and gas
via more-sustainable methods.
With the energy transition continuing at pace, the growth of
renewable energy has been exponential. Energy sources such as
nuclear and wind are set to account for a greater portion of the
energy mix. Renewables expenditure is also expected to double
over the next 10 years to more than $1,300 billion per year, and grid
expenditure is likely to exceed $1,000 billion per year in 2030.
However, oil and gas will undoubtedly play a crucial role in
meeting global energy demand for the foreseeable future. A recent
industry report highlighted that conventional hydrocarbons are set to
comprise 49% of the energy mix in 2050, emphasizing the sustained
requirement for traditional hydrocarbons.
It is no secret the oil and gas sector is a high producer of carbon
emissions, and according to the International Energy Agency, global
production, transportation, and processing of oil and gas emitted
the equivalent of 5.1 billion tons of CO2 in 2022. That’s almost 15%
of total energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. So, how do we as
an industry continue to extract this much needed energy source in a
more-sustainable manner?
Methods to curb this emission are already in practice, with
operators utilizing new technology to reduce waste-gas production,
return the gas to on-site product streams, and reinject methane
into reservoirs. A notable example came from ExxonMobil in
January of this year with the company announcing it had stopped
routine flaring of natural gas from production in the top US shale
basin, using compressors to push natural gas to a pipeline. It has
also allocated $17 billion through 2027 to lower its greenhouse gas
emissions globally.

Electrification is also a hot topic, with operators
investigating methodologies for how to reduce
emissions from offshore assets. bp, Equinor, and
Ithaca Energy recently signed a memorandum of
understanding to explore electrification options
for their offshore production facilities in the West
of Shetland area in the North Sea. Electrification
solutions could include power from shore,
potentially from onshore wind, or from offshore
wind. Full electrification would require in the
region of 200 MW of power. If successful, the fields
would become the first oil and gas developments
on the UK Continental Shelf to be powered by
electricity delivering a fully renewable solution.
These latest industry moves are bold. They
certainly show that much-needed action is now
taking place and that industry is responding
to social and environmental pressures to
make changes.
Yet, while new and innovative solutions are
being examined, there is one topic which is rarely
emphasized as a key driver in the path toward a
more-sustainable future—brownfield optimization.
Mature fields present exponential prospects for
the oil and gas industry to support global energy
demands with a reduced carbon footprint. So, why
is this not dominating the news agenda?
Simply put, many operators are unaware of the
opportunities they present.
Brownfields are defined as oil or gas
accumulations that have matured to a production
plateau or even progressed to a stage of declining
production. The advancement of technology has
allowed existing developments which would have
traditionally been abandoned to be rejuvenated.
While this ultimately enhances production, it also
delivers significant sustainability benefits.
Many reservoirs are abandoned, not because
the oil reserves are fully depleted, but because
they are too difficult, and costly, to reach. Norway
is leading the way in this sphere, with some of the
some of the highest recovery rates in the world.
The Troll field is a particularly strong example.
It was initially deemed uneconomical with a thin
GUEST EDITORIAL
oil column, and the reservoir structure made it
nearly impossible to produce oil with conventional
vertical wells. However, Equinor realized the value
of technology investment to boost extraction and
has pioneered the use of innovative systems, most
recently coupling multilaterals and expandable
drilling liners to gain greater economic value.
In comparison, many of the basins in the
US land market which have been plagued with
production issues for over 40 years are now
prolific producers with the development of
horizontal fracturing techniques. Even with
advances in extended recovery techniques,
the current recovery rate is still less than 12%.
When oil prices peaked around 2008, operators
worked quickly to drill, but this haste resulted in
damaged formations which now require significant
remediation to ensure they remain economical.
Ten years ago, when oil prices were high
and environmental impact was lower on the
priority list, an operator would simply shut up
shop and begin drilling in a new field. But times
have changed, and new technology is creating
opportunities that were unthinkable at the time.
However, the tide is starting to turn. A recent
report from Rystad Energy highlighted that
workover spend is projected to jump by nearly
20% in 2023 and total $58 billion, with operators
aiming to extract additional resources for existing
wells, opposed to drilling new ones.
Expandable tubulars have been one of
the greatest game-changers for brownfield
optimization. The progression of this technology
allows operators to solve complex well-integrity
issues such as reducing water production, sand
ingress, or nonproducing perforations without
losing valuable inner diameter (ID), keeping
the production viability high. Furthermore,
sidetrack drilling to allow for greater reservoir
drainage with horizontal wells enables economic
operations to take place, keeping the production
conduit large.
Modern expandable technology uses high-
performance materials and seals, enabling them
jpt.spe.org 13
 GUEST EDITORIAL
to handle high treating pressures as well as the
induced loads from large temperature cooldowns
seen in the fracturing environment or deep wells.
Many conventional straddles deployed during
well-intervention operations restrict the ID of the
well, which can negatively impact production rates
and wellbore access and increase project costs.
As operators attempt to gain greater recovery and
extend the life of existing fields, it’s essential that
an enhanced flow area is achieved. Expandable
patches are ultimately restoring and relining
existing wells, allowing operators to continue
producing from a reserve which may have been
previously deemed uneconomical.
By utilizing and essentially recycling existing
infrastructure and surface equipment, the
requirement for drilling drastically reduces, and
therefore the recovery of oil becomes far more
sustainable. Some of the latest expandables
available on the market today don’t even require
rigs, with wireline deployment a possibility,
reducing a project’s carbon footprint even further.
There is substantial work to do in
changing mindsets and educating operators
in the opportunities available to them through
expandable technology. Governments also play a
crucial role in driving this initiative.
Hydrocarbons remain an essential element of
the energy mix, so it is critical that incentives which
support emission reductions in this sector are
in place. There is no denying that the oil and gas
sector still follows a ‘race-to-be-second approach,’
so by subsidizing technology development
and funding pilot projects, substantial carbon
reductions can be garnered in the extraction of
oil and gas.
14 JPT | September 2023
There have been promising moves, with
the US Department of Energy announcing in
February this year it was seeking applications
for up to $74 million in funding for pilot projects
that can help advance the commercialization of
enhanced geothermal systems. It also revealed
it would invest $131 million for 33 research and
development (R&D) projects to advance the
wide-scale deployment of carbon-management
technologies to reduce CO2 pollution. This
funding is already enabling greater R&D in much-
needed technologies.
Expandables will be key in supporting CCS
projects, allowing relining of the full wellbore
ensuring well integrity from an aged well.
Currently, most oil and gas casing materials are
manufactured with high-grade carbon steel. For
operations where high levels of CO2 are present,
exotic steels are required. The industry is still
largely unaware that this steel grade can already be
applied in expandable casing—opening significant
opportunities in the CCS sector and allowing
existing oil and gas wells to be repurposed for CCS
purposes. Progress is already evident with projects
in the US, UK, Kuwait, and Australia.
As the decarbonization of oil and gas
intensifies, greater collaboration is required
between operators, supply chain, government,
and industry bodies to ensure that we effectively
harness the opportunities available to us. By
combining shared knowledge with existing
technologies, significant efficiencies can be
garnered in brownfield operations, allowing the
industry to strike the balance of meeting global
energy demands while substantially reducing
carbon footprint. JPT

FPSO Anita Garibaldi in Service off Brazil
Petrobras has brought its FPSO Anita Garibaldi
online in the Campos Basin offshore Brazil. The
unit will operate simultaneously in the post-salt
and pre-salt of the Marlim and Voador fields. With
a capacity to produce up to 80,000 B/D of oil and
process up to 7.0 million m3/d of natural gas, the
new FPSO is part of the Campos Basin Renewal
Plan—the largest mature asset recovery program
in the industry.
The Anita Garibaldi was built by MODEC and
will produce Marlim and Voador together with
FPSO Anna Nery, already in operation. The joint
production capacity of the two platforms is up
to 150,000 B/D of oil and processing capacity of
up to 11 million m3 of gas. Both will replace nine
platforms that operated in the Campos Basin
that will be decommissioned. By reducing the
FPSO Anita Garibaldi.
E&P NOTES
number of platforms in operation in the two fields,
greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by more
than 50%.
The Marlim and Voador revitalization project,
together with complementary development
projects and revitalization projects of other
fields, will contribute to increasing production in
the Campos Basin from the current 565,000 to
920,000 BOED in 2027.
Tullow Sells Guyana Assets
to Eco Atlantic
Tullow will sell its total interest in Tullow Guyana
to its minority partner Eco Atlantic for $700,000 in
cash and potential future payments, if production
starts. The deal will take Eco’s stake in the Orinduik
field, in which TotalEnergies owns 25% and where
Tullow drilled what it deemed two uncommercial
jpt.spe.org 15
 E&P NOTES
wells in 2019, to 75% and make Eco operator of the
project, according to Reuters.
Guyana has become a major oil producer in
recent years, with ExxonMobil operating prolific
fields in the vicinity of Orinduik. Tullow in 2020 said
it would focus the majority of its spending on its
existing infrastructure in West Africa, with Ghana
at its center.
Eco said it planned to drill to test the
cretaceous zone, which is the depth at which oil
discoveries were made in the adjacent Stabroek
Block, operated by ExxonMobil. It added it planned
to sell down part of its stake.
16 JPT | September 2023
If Eco makes a commercial discovery, it will
pay Tullow $4 million in addition to a further
$10 million if Guyana issues a production license
and royalty payments on future production.
Invictus Well Finds Potential in Zimbabwe
Invictus Energy has encountered multiple
hydrocarbon-bearing zones with its recently drilled
Mukuyu-1/ST1 well in the Cabora Bassa Basin
in Zimbabwe, one of the largest underexplored
interior rift basins in Africa. The well identified
13 potential hydrocarbon-bearing zones and
proved a working hydrocarbon system in the basin.
The company is preparing to drill the follow-
up Mukuyu-2 appraisal well, targeting the gas-
condensate and potentially light-oil intervals
encountered in the Mukuyu-1/ST1 well in the
Upper Angwa and Pebbly Arkose formations, with
the aim of confirming a gas-condensate discovery.
Mukuyu-2 is also expected to test additional
prospectivity in the deeper Upper Angwa and
undrilled Lower Angwa, which were not penetrated
in the Mukuyu-1/ST1 campaign, providing further
upside potential. It will also aim to test the Post
Dande horizon away from the major east/west
fault on the southern flank.
Mukuyu-2 is expected to spud in the third
quarter of 2023.

Ecopetrol Strikes Oil With
Alqamari-2 Well
Ecopetrol has confirmed a new oil discovery in the
Putumayo province in Colombia with its Alqamari-2
test. The well was drilled to a total depth of 9,287 ft
and resulted in a daily flow of 1,800 bbl of light oil,
according to the operator.
The discovery in Putumayo benefits from its
location close to producing oil fields and could take
advantage of existing infrastructure, according to
Ecopetrol. Alqamari-2 marks a significant turning
point in the area’s exploration, with the company
adding the resources could quickly be converted
to reserves.
The find comes shortly after Ecopetrol reported
a 61% fall in second-quarter net profit, mirroring
similar performances of regional peers Pemex and
Petrobras amid lower oil prices.
In May, Ecopetrol and Repsol found oil and
gas at the Tinamú-1 exploration well in Castilla
la Nueva (Meta) municipality.
The Tinamú-1 well produced a total of 7,329 bbl
of 16 °API heavy crude during the initial tests.
BW Energy Brings Third Well On Line
in the Hibiscus/Ruche Development
BW Energy confirmed that production has
started from the third well of the Hibiscus/Ruche
Borr Norve.
E&P NOTES
Phase 1 development in the Dussafu license
offshore Gabon. Well performance is in line with
expectations with current production at around
6,000 B/D.
The DHIBM-5H well was drilled as a horizontal
well from the BW MaBoMo production facility to
a total depth of 4245 m into Gamba sandstone
reservoir at the Hibiscus field. Following
completion, jackup Borr Norve began drilling
operations on the fourth production well
(DHIBM‑6H).
The drilling campaign targets four Hibiscus
Gamba and two Ruche Gamba wells, which
are expected to bring total oil production to
approximately 40,000 B/D when all wells are
completed in early 2024.
The oil produced at Hibiscus/Ruche is
transported by pipeline to the BW Adolo FPSO
for processing and storage before offloading to
export tankers.
Trillion Confirms Gas Offshore Turkey
Trillion Energy International announced well‑flow
test results from its Alapli-2 well at the SASB
gas field offshore Turkey. Alapli-2 has 32 m
of total gas pay in the A, B, C, and D sands of
the Akcakoca Member, which is 22.7 m thicker
than the offset well Alapli-1. Measured gas pay
thickness of 15.1 m was perforated and tested
in Alapli-2—9.1 m in the A sand and 6 m in the
D sand. A combined flow rate of 11.9 MMcf/D was
obtained using a 24/64-in. choke.
jpt.spe.org 17
 E&P NOTES

After drilling five successful long-reach Three rigs have been designated for the drilling
directional wells and one recompletion at SASB, operations on the Tilenga project. Sinopec 1501
Trillion said it will continue to perform several is operational at the Jobi-5 well pad and began
new perforations of existing wells and begin drilling operations on 28 June. The second rig is
to recalibrate the drilling program to optimize undergoing final tests at the Ngiri 3 well pad before
capital expenditures. drilling, while the third rig is being assembled and
The next phase of drilling is expected to is expected to begin operations in October. For
resume in mid-2024 and includes several sidetrack the Kingfisher project, the LR8001 rig has been
wells, long-reach directional wells, and stratigraphic operational since January.
exploration wells. Uganda’s oil projects are a collaborative
For the remainder of 2023, Trillion said it will effort between TotalEnergies EP Uganda,
focus on conducting field analysis to determine CNOOC Uganda Limited, and the Ugandan
how to maximize gas production and ascertain government, with the key facilities for the project
which gas pools require additional wells in the comprising the central processing facility, well
next phase of drilling, complete reprocessing and pads, flowlines, and a lake-water abstraction
remapping of the 3D seismic to delineate new system. Water is withdrawn from Lake Albert at
stratigraphic exploration, and plan and organize a water intake structure fixed to the lake bottom
the next drilling phase to maximize returns on approximately 1.5 km from the shoreline and
deployed capital. transferred to the shoreline via an intake pipe
After the perforation of Alapli-2, the wireline laid along the lakebed.
unit and tractors will be moved to Trillion’s Akcakoca
platform to carry out additional perforations.
Sinopec 1501
Uganda Drilling Operations Progress drilling rig.
for Tilenga, Kingfisher Projects
The drilling of production wells for the Kingfisher
and Tilenga oil production projects is continuing
since the launch in January 2023, in preparation for
the planned commencement of oil production in
Uganda in 2025.
Drilling of the first well for the Kingfisher field
has been completed to a total depth of about
3000 m, and the LR8001 rig is now at the location
for the second well. For the Tilenga project, the
initial phase will see the drilling of 12 development
wells on the Jobi-5 well pad, part of the Tilenga
oil fields.
The Uganda oil project envisions drilling over
450 wells on 35 well pads, leading to an estimated
production of 230,000 BOPD at its peak once
production begins. Production from multiple fields
that include Kingfisher, Jobi Rii, Ngiri, Kasamene-
Wahrindi, Gunya, Nsoga, and Kigogole will
contribute to this output.

18 JPT | September 2023


Semisubmersible
Deepsea Yantai.
Wellesley Finds Gas Condensate
and Light Oil at Carmen
Wellesley Petroleum struck a gas-condensate
column with its exploration well 35/10-10 S at
its Carmen prospect using semisubmersible rig
Deepsea Yantai in the Norwegian North Sea. The
well encountered a 210-m gas-condensate column
in the Ness, Etive, and Oseberg formations, 90 m
of which is in sandstone layers with poor to good
permeability. A 70-m gas-condensate column was
also encountered in the Cook formation, 23 m of
which is sandstone with poor permeability. A 13-m
light-oil column was also found in sandstones
in the Early Jurassic Amundsen Formation. No
formation water was encountered in the well.
An appraisal sidetrack, Carmen 35/10-10 A, was
drilled down-dip, 900 m west of the main bore, and
encountered a 240-m gas and volatile-oil column
in Ness, Etive, Oseberg, and Cook formations, 50 m
of which is in sandstone layers with generally poor
permeability. The well also encountered water-
filled sandstone of good reservoir quality in the
E&P NOTES
Cook formation. A gas/water contact was not
encountered in the well.
Drilling took place in license PL1148 (Wellesley
50%, DNO 30%, Equinor 10%, Aker BP 10%).
Wellesley estimated that the drilling
campaign has proved a developable gas-
condensate accumulation of 60 to 100 million
BOE. Development planning will now begin to
align with the schedules of other developments
in the area, including Toppand (Wellesley 5%),
Swisher (Wellesley 30%), Grosbeak (Wellesley 5%),
and Atlantis.
Information from the 35/10-A appraisal
well indicates the possibility for significant
upside volumes, with up to 300 million BOE
potentially being recoverable in and around the
accumulation, subject to successful exploration
and appraisal activity.
Woodside Returns Uneconomic Tract
to Trinidad
Australian explorer Woodside Energy has returned
its TTDAA 5 block, which it held in joint venture
with Shell, back to the government following an
appraisal of the Victoria discovery could not prove
up positive economics for a potential development.
Woodside cited the high costs associated with a
deepwater project as one reason for the move.
Woodside held a 65% working interest in the
block. Shell held the remaining 35%. Woodside got
into the Trinidad and Tobago offshore oil patch
in 2013 and in 2018 encountered gas with its
Victoria-1 well.
Woodside is continuing to study its other
deepwater operations in the area, chiefly blocks
23A and TTDAA 14, in which it made its Calypso
discovery. Calypso has an estimated recoverable
resource of 3.2 Tcf of natural gas. JPT
jpt.spe.org 19
Are We There Yet?
Tight-Oil Producers
Still Chipping Away
at Parent-Child Problems
TRENT JACOBS,
JPT Senior Technology Editor
I
n June, ExxonMobil’s CEO announced at
an investor conference that the oil giant is
experimenting with “very promising new
technologies” poised to substantially enhance
its recovery rates in the Permian Basin.
Darren Woods was light on specifics.
Nonetheless, ears perk up when the head of
the largest oil producer in the US suggests that
it’s making progress on its goal to double the
oft‑cited and oft-derided 10% recovery factor
of shale resource plays.
What Woods clued the outside world into is
ExxonMobil’s optimism around drilling extra‑long
horizontal wells (17,500-ft laterals vs. the
20 JPT | September 2023
A row of drilling rigs help
form what is known as a cube
development in the Permian
Basin. Source: ExxonMobil.
more‑typical 10,000 ft) and the work that engineers
are doing to make sure such wells can be effectively
propped. Both count as compelling kernels
to chew on.
But the CEO alluded to another area of
notable progress when he said, “There are very
few companies or organizations out there that
could tell you exactly how fracs propagate and
what that looks like underground—our view
is that’s just a hard science project problem
to solve.”
A couple of weeks later, the largest oil and gas
producer in the US shared a much more in-depth
assessment of that science problem at a different
 FEATURE | Tight-Oil Producers

industry gathering—this time the Unconventional VM Bench 1

Resources Technology Conference (URTeC).
In URTeC 3860704, two dozen authors from #1 #3
Bench 2
ExxonMobil describe a four-well test used to steer
decision making in the Midland Basin side of the Bench 3
#2 #4
Permian where it is among those drilling massive
multiwell projects known as cube developments. Bench 4
The experiment raised enough red flags for
ExxonMobil to rethink its plans for a tight-well
Pressure interference testing shows excessive
design. Multiple sources of data showed the wells communication between horizontal wells in different
were too close, their fracture networks in too much benches and “intermediate” to “medium” between wells
in the same bench. Warmer colors represent increased
communication. interference. Source: URTeC 3860704/ExxonMobil.
“These results suggest the pilot location was
overcapitalized and that future developments
should be drilled at fewer wells per section,” the posed by frac hits stemming from infill wells
authors concluded. using what it calls a “likelihood model” and a
Those are not words that an oil company “magnitude model.”
generally likes to hear. However, the point is that Such tools are critical since the Eagle Ford
ExxonMobil learned of a poor outcome on a small is known to be home to some of the most
scale which ostensibly preempted further financial catastrophic frac hits documented in industry
pitfalls at the location. literature. But the need goes beyond simply
Cautionary tales such as Concho Resource’s
23-well “Dominator Project” in 2019 have
demonstrated to all tight-rock producers—and
particularly Permian cube developers—the Completion
Design
consequences of insufficient subsurface analysis.
In the words of ExxonMobil’s engineers and
Well
other specialists, “This integrated project clearly
Spacing/ Production
established the value of running diagnostic pilots Stacking
and collecting high-resolution data before, during,
and after completions to quantify the size and Frac
shape of the fractures created and propped extent Hits
of the stimulated rock.”
ExxonMobil’s latest study is one of several Field
Well
Secondary
published this year to suggest that while the work Development
Intervention
is far from complete, significant leverage is being
gained over the parent-child phenomenon. Drilling
Another big operator known for keeping a Schedule
close eye on fracture propagation announced it
has developed a tandem of new models to help
improve parent-child relationships in the Eagle
At the center of it all. This graphic from a recent
Ford Shale of south Texas. ConocoPhillips paper underlines that frac hits hold
In URTeC 3873139, ConocoPhillips said its implications for all major parts of unconventional
developments. Source: URTeC 3873139/ConocoPhillips.
engineering teams can now quantitate the risk

jpt.spe.org 21
 FEATURE | Tight-Oil Producers
Wetted Fracture Geometry
Example 2D slice of cube drainage – nearest well wins
A “mental model” of the fractured subsurface
based upon a real-world test. Its creators warn the
illustration is a “drastic simplification” and yet it
offers a compelling look at how fracture networks
created too closely result in overlapping flow units for
each well to drain from—a less-than-ideal outcome.
Source: URTeC 3860704/ExxonMobil.
predicting them—operators must also know
what, if any, mitigation strategy to pick. The
advice ConocoPhillips offers on this topic could
be summed up as choose wisely.
Among other things, the company highlights
that refracturing older wells to protect them
from frac hits—an increasingly popular mitigation
strategy—has an ironic tendency to create
damaging frac hits that impact other wells.
Many of the new insights operators are
reporting would not be possible without the
strong uptake of downhole fiber-optic cables.
The richness of the fiber data has in a sense
given engineers of late a way to classify the DNA
of different frac hits, which is proving critical
in understanding how parent-child effects will
ultimately turn out.
Shared in February at the SPE Hydraulic
Fracturing Technology Conference and Exhibition
(HFTC), SPE 212370 is described by its authors as a
“first edition” catalog of fiber-strain data observed
during fracture interactions.
The authors stressed that “strain monitoring
is providing new data to better constrain
frac and reservoir simulations, thus making
22 JPT | September 2023
scenario modeling via simulator more accurate
and valuable.”
A testament to the role of industry
collaboration, the new primer for fiber signals
is the product of several experts from large US
producers—Shell, Chevron, Apache Corp., Devon
Energy—along with several others representing
petroleum engineering academia, consultancies,
and service companies.
Refining Cubism
ExxonMobil’s four-well pilot was also a test of its
“technology-driven workflow” that is being used
to guide the much bigger cube developments it
is drilling in the Permian.
That workflow was, according to the paper’s
authors, designed “to economically optimize
the entire oil-bearing stack all in one fell swoop,
from top to bottom, with the intent to eliminate
vertical parent-child well interactions within this
stack completely.”
Such a need has become especially pressing
in the maturing Midland Basin where the
proportion of infill child wells to parent wells shot
from 50% in 2015 to more than 75% by 2021,
according to data from Austin-based analytics firm
Novi Labs. Further, child wells in this half of the
Permian can underperform neighboring parents
by up to 40%.
And although the stated mission at
ExxonMobil’s test site was to see if the parent-
child effect could be avoided, that wasn’t what
happened at all.
A large but unspecified number of frac hits
were observed between the wells. But more
than that, the hits were measured using a
major investment in permanent and temporary
fiber optics, a vertical monitor well, time-lapse
geochemistry, and other top-shelf diagnostics.
Modeling along with direct measurements
taken from all the subsurface instruments revealed
how the strongest of the interactions came as
fractures ballooned upwards and cracked through
the formation’s distinct layers, or benches.

Likelihood Variables Ranking
Distance
Overlap
Production rate (parent)
Proppant/foot (child)
Fluid/foot (child)
Stage length (child)
Pad well count (child)
Cumulative production (parent)
Geology
(a)
The graphic shows how ConocoPhillips’ predictive models have ranked the importance of various variables as a
function of their likelihood to cause a frac hit (left) along with the factors that would increase the magnitude or
harm to production that one would cause (right). Source: URTeC 3873139/ConocoPhillips.
Of critical importance to ExxonMobil’s plans
was the fact that the project confirmed there
were no so-called “frac barriers” in this patch of
earth. As a result, fractures that cost millions of
dollars to create were overlapping each other
and competing for production in most of the rock
benches tested.
For their sacrifice, though, these test wells
would go on to help calibrate and improve
ExxonMobil’s models and forecasting for its wider
development plan.
In late July, ExxonMobil shared in its second-
quarter update that its cube developments in
Martin County, Texas, were generating a net
present value 20% above the cubes being drilled
by one of its leading rivals.
An Early Warning System
Before many people were using the terms frac hit
or parent-child with respect to unconventional
wells, ConocoPhillips had a big hand in shaping
how the industry views the problem today.
The company’s track record includes a
groundbreaking study published in 2017 that was
the first to capture core samples of hydraulically
fractured rock.
Since replicated several times over by others,
ConocoPhillips’ initial core-through study dispelled
previous beliefs about uniform fracture growth by
FEATURE | Tight-Oil Producers
Magnitude Variables Ranking
Distance
Production rate (parent)
Overlap
Geology
Pad well count (child)
Proppant/foot (child)
Cumulative production (parent)
Fluid/foot (child)
(b)
discovering instead complex swarms of fractures.
Some were small, others big, and a few were found
to extend over distances of 1,000 ft.
Today it views such excessive fracture growth,
i.e., frac hits, to be a potential threat to every major
aspect of field development.
The implications of which drove ConocoPhillips
to build a database to document every parent well
frac hit across its Eagle Ford asset that includes
1,600 wells. The next step was to turn to multivariate
analysis to create models to tell when frac hits might
strike, and what will happen when they do.
ConocoPhillips said its “likelihood model”
for predicting frac hits is still being refined but
boasted an 87% accuracy rate. Similarly, the model
was right 86% of the time when trying to predict
when a frac hit would not occur.
Past data has also been used to train a
separate but similarly reliable “magnitude model”
that estimates how much production might be
lost due to a frac hit.
A figure shared in the paper shows that
rather unsurprisingly well spacing is the
biggest determining factor in both models. But
it might come as a counterintuitive insight that
the magnitude model shows production rate to
be a bigger determinant of frac hit harm on a
parent than its cumulative production, a common
proxy used for reservoir depletion.
jpt.spe.org 23
 FEATURE | Tight-Oil Producers

(a) Frac Domain Corridor (FDC) When the Cure Is Worse Than
Single Entry – Single PC
the Disease
Wellbore being Observation
Stimulated Wellbore
ConocoPhillips issued a few other words of
MS Cloud
caution on managing frac hits with a special
FO Cable
Frac Domain Corridor note on refracturing.
Fracture Swarms
The need to protect parent wells from
Hydraulic Fractures their offspring has in recent years been a key
driver behind the decision to refracture them.
Near Field Far-Field
Diagnostics Diagnostics In addition to production uplift in the parent,
Current Nomenclature the parent refrac is needed to ward off, or at
• Frac Domain Zone FDZ (SHell/Optasense +) least mitigate, the damage caused by fresh
• Frac-Hit-Corridor FHC (Apache/ResFrac/Silixa +)
child fractures.
The authors from ConocoPhillips remarked
(b) Stage Domain Corridor (SDC)
Multi-Entry / PC Stages how conventional wisdom has considered there
Wellbore being Observation
to be few downsides with this strategy “because
Stimulated Wellbore the pressure is likely to be dissipated into the
MS Cloud FO Cable depleted regions around the refrac well.”
FDC
However, ConocoPhillips’ experience in
Stage
SDC Domain the Eagle Ford shows parent refrac frac hits
Corridor can be just as bad as the refracs it sees from
FDC
child completions.
“Catastrophic frac hits caused by
Stage
Domain refracturing have been observed, and this is
Corridor
SDC taken into account when selecting the number
and location of wells for refracturing,” the
paper emphasized.
The paper goes on to issue firsthand user
Proposed Nomenclature
• Frac Domain Corridor (FDC)
reviews on a series of other mitigation methods.
• Stage Domain Corridor (SDC) Among those with poor to mixed reviews were
preloading and the use of diverters. Preloading,
This illustration of a fracture interaction between which involves pumping small to large volumes
two wells shows the new concepts of a frac domain
corridor (top) and a stage domain corridor (bottom). of water at low rates into parent wells, was blamed
The proposed nomenclature stems from the uptake for increasing water cuts and thus degrading
of fiber-optic data and reflects today’s sophisticated
overall production.
understanding of how hydraulic fractures propagate.
Source: SPE 212370/Gustavo Ugueto. Outside of refracturing, ConocoPhillips listed
optimized drilling schedules, post-frac cleanouts,
and shutting in wells as case-by-case options for
“While the depletion level may not significantly protecting wells from frac hits.
impact the likelihood of frac hits, a high-rate well
can experience more production volume loss if it Decoding Fiber-Optic Signals
is affected by frac hits. For this reason, operators One thing shale producers have not found
often optimize their drilling schedules to avoid in their quest to solve frac hits and parent-
fracturing too close to parent wells with strong child problems is a single technology that can
production to reduce the risk,” the authors said. provide all the answers. That said, arguably

24 JPT | September 2023

none of the subsurface diagnostics relied upon
today have furthered the effort more than
fiber optics.
Supporting the idea is a new collaborative
study that aims to educate the shale sector on
interpreting strain signals for diagnosing fracture
interactions. In contrast to acoustic fiber data,
which has traditionally been utilized for monitoring
the fracturing process, and the more recent
emergence of nonfiber-based sealed wellbore
pressure monitoring, fiber strain offers an
unrivaled degree of precision.
The authors of SPE 212370 said fiber
strain data “provides the best indication we’ve
got today of the timing, location, and relative
magnitude of the fracture interactions between
wells during stimulation.”
With new data come new concepts such as
the frac domain corridor (FDC) which the fiber
experts are using to describe the rock area
containing a relatively contained swarm of fracture
“strands” that are most likely generated by single-
entry completion designs. Then there is the idea of
a stage domain corridor (SDC) which encompasses
multiple fractures propagating out of a multiple-
entry stage.
Each of these fracture states will look different
in the strain data, which should in turn provide
big clues to engineers about how their completion
is going.
For instance, if the reopening of existing FDCs
is detected or the larger SDCs are overlapping, then
one may be safe in assuming there is a problem
with well construction or that an isolation plug
is failing.
And, as the authors point out, it is because
of the strain data that the impact of those
isolation problems are now known to extend from
the near field into the far field. A more recent
revelation they credit to strain monitoring is that
the reopening of hydraulic fractures happens
quite frequently “not only between prior and
infill wells but also between wells from the same
stimulation vintage.”
REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL
The Wyoming gas injection Initiative (WGII)
makes available $22 million of matching funds
from the State of Wyoming to implement, in
close collaboration with oil and gas operators
and Dow, multiple field pilot projects in the
State of Wyoming.
The initiative involves field pilot testing of
advanced enhanced oil recovery technologies
such as foam-assisted gas injection using
recovered hydrocarbon gases, carbon dioxide,
and other gases for revitalization of oil fields as
well as mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions
by operations in the State. The initiative also
includes laboratory-scale de-risking of the
recovery schemes, both research and technical
services using site-specific rock and fluid
samples under relevant field operation
conditions, at the world-leading Center of
Innovation for Flow through Porous Media
(COIFPM) of the University of Wyoming.
The initiative will fund projects over a 3-to-5-year
period to support developments with significant
potential to enhance well productivity and
recovery from existing fields and wells in
Wyoming that are in significant decline. Both
field pilot testing and laboratory-scale studies
will receive funding to advance implementation.
RFP closes at 11:59 p.m. MST (Mountain
Standard Time) on Friday, September 29, 2023.
The selected applicant(s) will be notified by
Thursday, November 30, 2023.
LEARN MORE & APPLY
https://www.uwyo.edu/research/coifpm/index.html
jpt.spe.org 25
 FEATURE | Tight-Oil Producers

(a) Observed Signal (b) Observed Signal

×104 ×104 3H stage 29 FDIs on 12H stage start: 26-Jan-2022 18:34:00

1 50

Extending
1.71
0.98 Stim well heel 0.8 40
Time and Possible multiple
location 0.6 1.7 30
0.99 FDCs from a single
of FDC cluster stage?
0.4 20
interception

No Change
0.2 1.69

Phase (rad)

Strain Rate
1 10
md (ft)

md (ft)
0 0
1.01 1.68
–0.2 –10
–0.4 –20

Compressing
1.02 Stim well toe 1.67
–0.6
–30
1.03 –0.8 1.66 –40
–1
–20 0 20 40 60 80 100 –50
–60 –40 –20 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140
a 1 b 2 a 1 b 2
Elapsed Stage Time (min) Elapsed Stage Time (min)
a. Pressure-test b. Intercepting single FDC a. Pressure-test b. Intercepting single FDC
1. Start of stage 2. End of stage 1. Start of stage 2. End of stage

Example of strain data from two single cluster stages in the Anadarko Basin and Eagle Ford Shale, respectively. Both
show a well-defined shift when a fracture intercepts the fiber cable as strain builds in red and then reverses as the
stimulation ends in blue. Both signals are representative of a single fracture domain corridor (FDC) arriving. However,
the figure on the right shows an uneven signature indicating an interaction might be moving along the fiber which in
turn could be interpreted as multiple FDCs arriving over the stage treatment. Source: SPE 212370/Jackson Haffener.

The implications of such learnings touch FOR FURTHER READING

multiple steps in the process from well spacing and
sequencing (i.e., zipper and stacked scenarios) to SPE 212370 A Catalogue of Fiber-Optics Strain-
the idea of right-sizing each stage’s dose of water Rate Fracture-Driven Interactions by Gustavo
and sand. Ugueto, Shell Exploration and Production
There is increasing pushback in technical Company; Kan Wu, Texas A&M University; and
circles against what the authors called “a pervasive Ge Jin, Colorado School of Mine, et al.
practice” of simply increasing stimulation volumes URTeC 3860704 An Integrated Approach to
as a means of extracting more value from the Development Optimization Using Monitor
rock. “Bigger fracs are not necessarily better if Wells and Hydraulic Fracture Diagnostics in
they don’t contribute to well production,” was the Permian Basin by Ripudaman Manchanda,
the submitted argument. Yueming Liang, and Holger Meier, et al.,
Looking a bit further ahead, the group behind ExxonMobil.
the study speculated that technology advancement URTeC 3873139 Eagle Ford Parent Well Frac
will improve strain-data resolution from the Hit (Frac-Driven Interaction) Impact
current 1 to 5 m range to less than 1 m. If that Characterization, Prediction, and Mitigation
happens, then engineers may for the first time by Yongshe Liu, Lucy Luo, and Susan Naiser, et al.,
be able to detect not just fracture swarms but ConocoPhillips.
those individual strands of fractures—putting
the industry one big step closer to knowing what
fractures really look like. JPT

26 JPT | September 2023

RENEW YOUR
MEMBERSHIP
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Test Shows Fracturing
Can Also Create
UNDERGROUND
WATER HEATING
SYSTEMS
STEPHEN RASSENFOSS, Emerging Technology Senior Editor

Fervo Energy’s Project Red test

site in Nevada. Source: Fervo Energy.

28 JPT | September 2023

 FEATURE | Fracturing Geothermal Wells

F
ervo Energy has shown that fracturing can be used to
build a geothermal heating system in hot, hard rock.
During a 37-day test at its Project Red test
site, the Houston company produced as much as
63 L/s (998 gal/min) of water heated to 336°F. By pumping
water from an injection well through fractured hot rock to
a producing well, it heated enough water to generate up to
3.5 MW of power, according to a company release.
In a world where demand is commonly measured in
gigawatts, that’s not much, but it is more than double the
highest flow rate from tests going back decades. And unlike
those earlier tests, the company has a clear path to heating
higher volumes and lowering the cost.
“I think this is just a big moment for both our company,
but also the industry at large, to finally have this proof point
where we can deliver commercial levels of permeability and
flow rates for these wells,” said Jack Norbeck, co-founder and
chief technical officer for Fervo.
The idea of injecting water through hot rock has been
around for decades as a way to create enhanced geothermal
systems (EGS), but this is the first time someone has achieved
this level of flow and is moving next to create a group of
geothermal wells for commercial generation.

jpt.spe.org 29
 FEATURE | Fracturing Geothermal Wells
Fervo has taken methods developed to extract
oil and gas from ultratight rock and shown they can
be used to do something quite different.
“Overall, there’s nothing really surprising
here—they used a pretty standard shale frac
design and observed pretty similar performance
from what you would see in a shale play. Or at
least, what you’d expect if you used a shale well
as a long-term water injector and circulated fluid
over to a neighboring production well,” said Mark
McClure, chief executive of ResFrac, a reservoir
modeling and consulting firm, in a blog post.
This fracturing-based option poses a
challenge to EGS researchers who live in countries
where completions using oil industry fracturing
techniques are not an option.
“The EGS community has conventionally
been focused on ‘stimulating natural fractures,’
and this has led them to use fracture designs
that would be considered suboptimal, from
the perspective of oil and gas field experience,”
McClure said.
What Fervo has done is show that fracturing
can be used to get past a barrier blocking EGS
development using current fracturing technology.
“The breakthrough is that someone actually
had the guts and organization to go out and do it,”
McClure said.
Those at Fervo, though, have little time
to celebrate the milestone as they focus on
improving those methods to economically produce
geothermal energy.
“In successfully completing this project, we
have demonstrated that no major technical
barriers exist to deploying horizontal EGS in similar
meta-sedimentary or igneous formations to
temperatures of approximately 400°F,” according
to a Fervo paper.
That feat was recognized by a leader at the
FORGE test site, which is also doing EGS research
and development with substantial financial support
from the US Department of Energy.
“Fervo’s achievement is an outstanding advance
for the geothermal industry,” said John McLennan,
30 JPT | September 2023
a professor at the University of Utah, who manages
EGS research at FORGE.
In July, FORGE announced it had successfully
pumped a relatively low amount of water from a
fractured injection well to a production well at its
Utah test site. It verified the origin of the produced
water using tracers and chemical analysis. They will
be doing further studies on the heating network,
where flows were limited around its unfractured
production well.
Fervo’s 37-day pilot is a part of its program to
rapidly reach commercial-scale EGS production.
It is up against a deadline set by two contracts to
supply 53 MW of geothermal power to California
customers by 2026.
Going Bigger
If Fervo and others can replicate this success,
the achievement is roughly analogous to Mitchell
Energy developing the fracturing design that
allowed gas production from ultratight rock.
Both companies showed that fracturing can
be used to solve a previously unsolved problem. A
big difference, as Norbeck repeatedly pointed out,
is Fervo has the benefit of decades of fracturing
technology advances since Mitchell’s discovery in
the Barnett Shale.
Now Fervo needs to figure out how to cost
effectively use this familiar technology in an
unfamiliar way.
The announcement confidently said there
is “a clear innovation pathway to increasing the
power capacity up to 8 MW of electric power per
production well.”
That target was set by the National Renewable
Energy Laboratory. The output target per well
matters because to compete with the price of other
power sources, the number and cost of the wells
must be limited.
The company will be testing its approach for
rapidly scaling up to commercial production at a
multiwell development near the FORGE test site in
central Utah. Those wells will be drilled near a plant
designed to generate electricity using water heated

Fervo’s Project Red test pumped water from a horizontal injection well to a production well, with data flowing from a
vertical observation well. Source: Fervo Energy.
to a level well below the temperature required for
gas- and coal-fired power generation plants.
In line with the oil industry trend, they will
increase the production per well and reduce the
cost of building them by extending the laterals
from 3,250 to 5,000 to 7,500 ft, Norbeck said.
They will also be reducing the number of stages
by making them longer. It plans to do so by adding
more perforation clusters, based on a test at the
recent commercial pilot well.
The injection well had 16 stages, each about
150 ft long. There were 14 stages, with six perf
clusters with six perforations each, and two with
nine clusters with fewer shots per cluster. To ensure
all those entry holes on test stages were stimulated,
they used an extreme limited-entry design.
FEATURE | Fracturing Geothermal Wells
The thinking was that “increasing the cluster
count is one of the fastest ways to drive down
costs on the completion,” in oil and gas shale,
Norbeck said.
Creating fractures capable of delivering large
volumes of heated water was not an issue in the
first well. The conductivity of those fractures was
surprisingly high, ranging from 300 to 400 md/ft.
Norbeck said it was as much as an “order of
magnitude higher than you typically think about
in oil and gas.”
“We’re targeting production flow rates on
the order of 30,000 to 50,000 B/D per well,” he
said. That rate and high conductivity were a big
plus in wells where they installed 7-in.-diameter
production casing to handle the water flow.
jpt.spe.org 31
 FEATURE | Fracturing Geothermal Wells
The co-founders of Fervo Energy: Jack Norbeck (left) and Tim Latimer. Source: Fervo Energy.
A battery of diagnostic tests showed the
injection and production wells delivered “flow
allocation along the entire lateral,” according to
the Fervo paper.
Adapting fracturing for geothermal will require
a focus on consistently creating long, evenly spaced
fractures from the injection well to the production
well, sized to balance the goals of high-volume
production and efficient heating. Or as least as
consistently as is possible pumping high volumes
of water to crack reservoir rock.
Based on extensive fiber-optic and other data
collected, the produced water was heated to 336°F,
not far below the 362°F reservoir temperature.
The Fervo paper described the fractures as
relatively evenly distributed without “thermal short-
circuit pathways.”
“Distributed flow is important for thermal
longevity,” McClure said.
32 JPT | September 2023
Hard But Frackable
Fervo’s next test site near FORGE’s site in Utah will
determine if it can deliver similar results in an area
with a mix of hard rocks different from the Project
Red site, and if it can do so for a long time.
Both sites offer good geology for geothermal
with the rocks in the heating zone described
as granitic, which means different things in
different places.
At the Project Red site, the formation is
composed mainly of phyllite, along with some
quartzite and granite.
Phyllite is a metamorphic rock created when
shale is transformed by heat and pressure. “In
terms of metamorphic progression, the rock goes
through the transition from mudstone, shale, slate,
phyllite, schist, and finally to gneiss,” Norbeck said.
“It’s just been metamorphosed and has slightly
different stiffness and mechanical properties, and
 FEATURE | Fracturing Geothermal Wells

so it might not be as different as you think,” he actually a massive resource base at depths that
said in an interview with JPT Senior Technology are drilled routinely in the oil and gas industry.”
Editor, Trent Jacobs. And on the power-generation side, “All of the
“The Utah FORGE geology is more of a innovation over the last 10 or 20 years has driven
granitic/gneissic mashup,” McClure wrote. to produce higher-efficiency power plants at lower
Norbeck said that the horizontal wells temperatures,” according to Norbeck.
drilled at Project Red encountered several
granite seams as thick as 100 ft within the mix Sand and Drill Bits
of metamorphic shales. When it comes to proppant and drill bits, things are
Recent tests by Fervo and FORGE have shown not so different between shale and geothermal.
this rock can be fractured, which Norbeck said Drillers on geothermal projects are
they had expected to be able to do based on a working to slash the days per well as they did
fracturing test a couple of years before. in unconventionals. When Fervo drilled the
“We did not see a significant difference in first of its 11,000-ft-long Project Red wells, it
terms of the fracture-initiation properties … took 72 days. They finished the second well in
correlated to geology,” he said, adding, it is “not 59 days, and Norbeck expects that to continue
that surprising because the primary thing that to fall to levels comparable to the levels in shale
drives fracture initiation and propagation is your oil and gas.
state of stress. And that’s generally pretty uniform
on a local scale.
“Extrapolating to other basins, whether it’s the
Utah FORGE area or elsewhere across the basin
and range, we feel that these results are very
representative of what we can expect in some
of these other basins,” Norbeck said.
The plan is to develop enough injection and
production wells at the site to generate power at
a plant built to efficiently generate electricity using
water heated to around 400°F.
Fervo’s plan is to develop formations where the
formation temperature is 425°F or lower.
Those temperatures, cooled by the fluid
pumped while building and completing a well,
makes this “kind of the sweet spot where you
can use all existing technology on the drilling,
completion side,” Norbeck said.
There are also a lot of places where rock that
hot can be found within 10,000 ft of the surface.
“If you think about where things are going,
a lot of people are focused on going hotter and
deeper,” he said.
While hotter steam can be more valuable,
operating at those temperatures adds to the
technical challenges and costs, and “there is

jpt.spe.org 33
 FEATURE | Fracturing Geothermal Wells
The reductions were a product of a drilling
crew learning how to drill faster in hard rock and
improvements in the bits based on that experience.
While the market for geothermal drilling
hardware is microscopic, bit makers are showing
interest. Norbeck said, “A lot of people want to
work with us now.”
Fervo also pumped a significant-sized job—
540,000 lb of sand in 16,000 bbl of slickwater at a
rate of 100 bbl/min.
In contrast, the three-stage FORGE test did not
use any sand to increase conductivity. McLennan
said that was because “the intent there was to
establish connectivity.”
Proppant is required to maintain flow paths
in oil wells where the pressure and production
drop. While falling pressure and depletion are not
factors in geothermal, proppant is still considered
essential for high conductivity.
Fervo’s team is critically evaluating how much
proppant is needed as they look for ways to
manage the cost of creating conductivity. And they
want to minimize the risk of sand traveling out
with the heated water into power plants where
the abrasive grains can cause damage.
So far, produced sand does not appear to
be an issue. The propped fractures delivered
conductivity measurements that are so high
that Norbeck said they will be gathering more
data to confirm them.
“More testing required, but I think we will see
similar trends that oil and gas saw—larger-volume
treatment designs with more sand leading to
higher production,” he said.
Production-well completions are also
something that could change over time as
they gather more data.
At the FORGE test site, they fractured only
the injection wells and are now looking for
34 JPT | September 2023
ways to increase the flow rates around the
production well.
“The reservoir engineering back analysis
suggests a highly conductive domain extending a
substantial distance from the injection well towards
the production well and a ‘ligament’ of reduced
hydraulic conductivity around the production well,”
McLennan wrote.
McLennan said FORGE is looking for ways to
eliminate this constriction with options including
pumping larger treatments, more viscous fluids,
proppant, and “certainly eventually treating
the producer.”
Fervo’s description of its injection and
production wells showed they varied, with
16 stages in the injection well and 20 in the
producer. When asked if they had any ideas
how to optimize the completion of the production
well, Norbeck wrote that will depend on
future results.
“In our industry, the most impactful innovations
come from hard-won learnings during full-scale,
commercial operations. We will continue to
perform field trials and iterate on our design
well by well, pad by pad to improve our production
and lower our costs.” JPT
FOR FURTHER READING
Commercial Demonstration of a First-of-a-Kind
Enhanced Geothermal System by Jack Norbeck
and Timothy Latimer, Fervo Energy.
URTeC 3852680 Case Study: Completion
and Well Placement Optimization Using
Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensing in Next-
Generation Geothermal Projects by Aleksei
Titov, Jack Norbeck, and Sireesh Dadi, et al.,
Fervo Energy.
 Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center
San Antonio, Texas, USA
16–18 October 2023

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 FEATURE | Floating Rigs

Hurdles Will Keep

Deepwater Rig Fleet
Size in Check
BLAKE WRIGHT, Technology Editor

Transocean drillship Deepwater Titan

was delivered at the end of 2022.
This unit and its sister Deepwater
Atlas, delivered in June 2022, are
the only 8th-generation drillships in
existence. Source: Transocean.

36 JPT | September 2023


I
t has been a tumultuous few years for
offshore rig contractors operating in deep
water across the globe. Over the past half
decade, deepwater specialists Valaris,
Diamond Offshore, Noble Corp., and Seadrill
have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection,
due in large part to the impacts of the COVID-19
pandemic that effectively shut down the market
from 2020 until 2022.
A few years before that, Ocean Rig filed for
Chapter 15 bankruptcy after lower oil prices
prompted a series of contract cancellations for
its drillship-heavy fleet, while rival Pacific Drilling
suffered a similar fate that same year.
Post-pandemic, Transocean now owns the
Ocean Rig fleet, Noble scooped up Pacific, and oil
prices have risen and stabilized to the point that
demand for deepwater rigs has been climbing.
It’s a refreshing shift after 36 months of cold
stacking, selling, or flat-out retiring assets from
the marketed fleet.
Forty-nine floating units—37 semisubmersibles
and 12 drillships, according to Westwood Global
Energy Group—were expunged from the global
floating rig fleet during the pandemic years. Most
of these units were older and not likely to return to
drilling service after any significant length on the
sidelines. Units that weren’t retired or sold were
idled to wait out the depressed market.
Companies like Valaris are taking the renewed
demand in deepwater rigs, especially drillships, and
parlaying that into opportunities to reactivate and
upgrade cold-stacked rigs. Earlier this year, drillship
Valaris DS-17 departed the shipyard ahead of its
contract with Equinor Offshore Brazil. It marked
the company’s fifth floater reactivation in the past
18 months.
Valaris DS-17 is one of the highest-specification
drillships in the global fleet today and will be the
first rig to deploy NOV’s Atom RTX Robotic System
Offshore, reducing the need for personnel in the
red zone. It also became only the second rig in the
world after Valaris DS-12 to receive ABS’ Enhanced
Electrical System Notation, EHS-E. The rig’s
FEATURE | Floating Rigs
electrical system is designed to optimize power
plant performance, enabling operations on fewer
generators and reducing emissions. These targeted
upgrades help to improve the safety and efficiency
of the rig.
“Active utilization for sixth- and seventh-
generation drillships has, on average, exceeded
90% for more than 12 months,” Valaris Chief
Executive Anton Dibowitz told investors in August.
“Looking at forward demand, we expect leading-
edge day rates to continue on an upward trajectory
from the current levels in the mid- to high-400s
($400,000). Recent fixtures and tenders with
increased durations, lead times. and day rates
provide further evidence that we are in a strong
and sustainable up cycle.”
At the end of July, Valaris was able to secure
a new contract that would result in another
reactivation. The driller was awarded a 12-well
contract offshore West Africa for cold-stacked
drillship Valaris DS-7. The contract is expected
to begin in the second quarter 2024 and has
an estimated duration of 850 days. The total
contract value is estimated to be $364 million,
or a day rate just over $428,000. The contract
requires minimal customer-specific upgrades to
the rig and does not include the provision of any
additional services.
The number of drillships that can be
reactivated is finite with around a dozen or so
remaining following this latest fixture. A further
eight newbuild drillships remain in South Korean
shipyards, including the Valaris DS-13 and DS-14.
However, Valaris plans to exercise its purchase
options on these drillships.
“Both DS-13 and DS-14 are amongst the
highest-specification assets in the global fleet
and all the most technically capable drillships still
available at South Korean shipyards per third-party
rig rankings,” Dibowitz said. “They are the only
remaining drillships available at the South Korean
shipyards with two blowout preventers (BOPs),
and we estimate that it would cost approximately
$50 million to add a second BOP to a ship that is
jpt.spe.org 37
 FEATURE | Floating Rigs

$500,000
Cold-stacked (deepwater/ultradeepwater floaters) $479,629
$450,000
NAME TYPE
Bicentenario Semisub $400,000

Bluewhale II Semisub $350,000

Centenario GR Semisub
Dalian Developer Drillship $300,000

Deepwater Champion Drillship $250,000

Discoverer Americas Drillship
$200,000
Discoverer Clear Leader Drillship
Discoverer India Drillship $150,000
Discoverer Luanda Drillship
$100,000
Keppel Can Do Drillship
Dec-18 Nov-19 Nov-20 Oct-21 Sep-22 Aug-23
Ocean Rig Apollo Drillship
Ocean Rig Athena Drillship
Fig. 2—Drillship fixtures since 2019. Source: RigLogix.
Ocean Rig Mylos Drillship
Pacific Meltem Drillship
Pacific Scirocco Drillship
Valaris DPS-3 Semisub The tightening market is driving increased contract
Valaris DPS-6 Semisub
duration, lead times, and day rates, all pointing to
Valaris DS-11 Drillship
“a strong and sustained up cycle.”
Valaris DS-7 Drillship
West Eclipse Semisub Historically, rising demand and the pool
of available units drying up has fueled talks of
Newbuilds (deepwater/ultradeepwater floaters)
newbuilds. However, most of that chatter has not
NAME TYPE STATUS surfaced this go-around due largely to the fact that
DS-13 Drillship Valaris option replacement-level day rates are closer to $700,000
DS-14 Drillship Valaris option
to $800,000, not the $500,000 levels of today. The
Keppel Can Do Drillship Shipyard owned
Opus Tiger-2 Drillship Shipyard owned
estimated cost of a new 8th-generation drillship
Opus Tiger-3 Drillship Shipyard owned today is running close to $1 billion, and that’s just
Opus Tiger-4 Drillship Shipyard owned one hurdle that is likely to keep any newbuild cycle
Pacific Zonda Drillship Eldorado Drilling, newly off the menu.
acquired as of April 2023
West Aquila Drillship Transocean (Liquila Ventures)
West Dorado Drillship Eldorado Drilling, newly
Financing, Energy Transition Will Keep
acquired as of April 2023 Newbuilding at Bay
West Draco Drillship Shipyard owned “I’m going to tell you something that’s going to
West Libra Drillship Northern Drilling shock you: There will likely never be another
Fig. 1—Cold-stacked and stranded newbuilds. Source: newbuild cycle,” said Leslie Cook, principal analyst
Wood Mackenzie Offshore Rig Tracking Tool. for upstream at Wood MacKenzie.
“Now, there are potential scenarios that we
only equipped with one. We see strong customer consider to be low probabilities that could change
interest in these rigs and will only reactivate the that, like a major technological breakthrough that
DS-13 and DS-14 for contracts that are expected to takes nearly all people off the rig and turns it into
generate a meaningful return on our reactivation a giant robot. But there are not a lot of indicators
costs over the initial firm term.” that would justify a newbuild cycle for oil and gas
Dibowitz called the outlook for the drilling rigs, including the way we’re looking at it
ultradeepwater market “very positive” on the from peak oil demand happening in 10 years from
back of increasing demand and constrained supply. now as we move into the energy transition future.

38 JPT | September 2023


Why would you build out a whole new cycle of rigs
once oil demand peaks?”
Oil will never become unnecessary, but the
energy transition will likely make it less necessary
as the world moves toward less carbon-intensive
fuels to power daily life. As operators pump more
and more cash into carbon capture projects,
hydrogen production, wind farms, and other
green energy projects, those dollars begin to
compete with investment opportunities across
the company’s assets. If rig rates continue to rise,
there could come a time when operators back off
oil projects due to economic concerns. That, in
turn, could cool the market.
Another reason we are not likely to see a
newbuild cycle for offshore rigs? Contractor
appetites.
“Let’s remember what just happened the last
5 years,” said Cook. “Five drilling contractors went
into bankruptcy. Some rigs were retired, or left half
built, that could be working today. Rig contractors
have painfully gotten the supply down to where
they’re now making money again, and they are
not going to start building on spec again.”
Another hurdle to clear if newbuilds are in
the future is the ability to secure financing for any
program. With many offshore drillers now coming
out of some of the worst financial conditions for
their respective companies, one could understand
the hesitancy of both the contractor and any
would-be bank to commit to $1 billion-plus for
a new drillship.
“While the new day rates and high utilization
all sound great, and they are, the day rates
themselves are not at the level they need to be to
justify building a rig,” explained Terry Childs, head
of RigLogix for Westwood Global Energy Group.
“Regarding financing, the last cycle, that 2011
through 2013 period, you had a lot of shipyards
willing to finance with little down payment and
milestone payments over time, but that would not
happen now. There’s also not just yard financing,
but many of these yards have stated they’re out
of the rig-building business. They’re building some
FEATURE | Floating Rigs
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
Drillship Semisub
Fig. 3—Utilization of drillships and semisubmersibles.
Source: Wood Mackenzie Offshore Rig Tracking Tool.
of these wind vessels and FPSOs and other non-
drilling vessels.”
Beyond a massive technological breakthrough,
there remains a couple of outliers that could
result in a new rig or two being built over the next
few years—unforeseen demand from frontier
areas such as Namibia and beyond, or increased
requirements for hardware capable of drilling at
20,000 psi.
However, even the outliers have their own set
of roadblocks to overcome.
“For instance, say five operators came out and
said they each have a year’s worth of 20K work,”
said Childs. “Well, that may be tempting to a rig
owner, but even then that’s only 5 years of work.
The rig owner still has to get work beyond that,
but in the past, they have been willing to take that
risk. Now, however, I don’t know if that’s enough to
make a rig owner order a 20K unit. I think it would
conservatively take 3 years to build it, plus there
are still some existing units that could be upgraded
for 20K operations faster.”
Exciting deepwater areas in Africa and other
spots have garnered a lot of operator attention
over the past several years with the likes of Guyana
and Namibia leading the way. Although these hot
spots will likely attract more rigs over time, none
of them are expected to be needle movers when it
comes to potential newbuilds.
jpt.spe.org 39
 FEATURE | Floating Rigs
“When I think of Namibia, we could see
another maybe two or three rigs go there,” said
Cook. “Maybe five rigs at the most. It’s still not
Brazil. Now, West Africa as a whole is definitely
showing some increased demand. That means rigs
are going to have to move because a lot of rigs
left Africa in 2020. We’ve already seen rig counts
start to recover in West Africa and there is more
demand to come.”
The First (and Last?) of Their Kind
In 2014, deepwater-rig specialist Transocean
ordered a pair of drillships from Sembcorp
Marine at a cost of $540 million each. The units
were scheduled for delivery in early 2017 and
early 2018, respectively, and were to be based on
Jurong Shipyard’s proprietary Jurong Espadon III
design—a next-generation, high-specification unit
for the time.
The rigs were to feature state-of-the-art drilling
facilities, a large moonpool to accommodate
a larger riser angle, bilge boxes designed for
improved motion characteristics, larger deck space
with enclosed riser bay, and round mud pits inside
the hull for operational efficiency and safety. It
would be capable of operating at 12,000 ft water
depth and drilling to depths of 40,000 ft. However,
a few years into the project, it would pivot.
“While Deepwater Atlas and Deepwater Titan
were originally ordered in 2014, these two projects
shifted in 2018 when one of our customers
approached us with an opportunity to design and
construct a rig capable of drilling in 20,000-psi
environments—the new frontier of ultradeepwater
drilling,” explained Marijana Sosic, manager,
technical marketing at Transocean.
“As a result of the new rig design and
construction management contract, and the
execution of a 5-year drilling contract with the
customer, we shifted gears at that time and began
working on the enhanced design, construction, and
delivery requirements set forth in the construction
contract to meet the new 20K-psi objectives,”
Sosic said.
40 JPT | September 2023
Not long after Transocean finished the design
phase of the upgrades and were starting to
implement them on site, the COVID-19 pandemic
temporarily halted both projects. After construction
restarted, the contractor worked to overcome
manpower shortages, supply chain delays, and
travel restrictions. The sea trial program was
significantly modified to obtain approval to leave
port from relevant authorities.
Ultimately, in June 2022, the world’s first
8th‑generation drillship, dubbed the Deepwater
Atlas, was delivered. The completed drillship
features a 3-million-lb hookload hoisting capacity
and sets a new frontier for next-generation
drillships with its ability to accommodate well
control systems for 20,000-psi drilling and
completion operations.
The Deepwater Titan was delivered at the
end of the year. These two rigs remain the only
8th‑generation drillships in the world.
“Some of the key differentiators between
7th- and 8th-generation rigs are the technical
specifications and operational capabilities,
including well control capabilities and hoisting
capacity,” explained Sosic. “Both the Deepwater
Atlas and Deepwater Titan became the first of
their kind—8th-generation drillships—offering
20,000‑psi well control capabilities and a
3.4-million-lb hoisting capacity, the highest-rated
equipment in the industry. This newest generation
of ultradeepwater drillships will allow Transocean,
and its customers, to access high-pressure and
high-temperature reservoirs that previously were
not accessible. The equipment on our newest
drillships, in addition, can reduce the time it takes
to drill a deepwater well, bringing total costs down
for our customers.
“For context, 7th-generation rigs offer
2.5- to 2.8-million-lb hoisting capacity, and
15,000‑psi well control systems, while operating
in water depths up to 12,000 ft. Sixth-generation
rigs offer a hoisting capacity of up to 2.0 million
lb and are rated for water depths up to 10,000 ft,”
she said.
 FEATURE | Floating Rigs

The rigs’ well control equipment upgrades

allow it to safely access 20,000-psi reservoirs,
which include an industry first 20,000-psi BOP
that was engineered, built, and installed, as well
as the 20,000-psi rated choke manifolds designed
for high-pressure drilling, cement manifolds
and cementing unit, and associated riser string
modifications. This equipment was designed and
delivered specifically for projects that require
up to 20,000-psi drilling capabilities—marking
new firsts, not only for Transocean, but for the
entire industry.
“Transocean’s 8th-generation drillships are
the only two assets in the world specifically
designed to maximize efficiencies for 20,000-psi
well completions,” said Sosic. “The vessels and
marine risers have been outfitted for 20,000-psi
well control capability, including cement systems,
integral hull piping, and riser choke and kill
auxiliary lines. Deepwater Atlas. Source: Transocean.
The Deepwater Titan is outfitted with two
20,000-psi BOPs, while the Deepwater Atlas is
outfitted with one 15,000-psi BOP and one pre-COVID levels, and day rates for best-in-class
20,000‑psi BOP. Both rigs possess a 3.4-million-lb floating rigs have doubled in the past 2 years.
hoisting capacity. To provide this hoisting capability, The globe’s Golden Triangle—US Gulf, Brazil,
upgrades had to be made to the derrick structure and West Africa—is expected to lead demand
and a new active heave‑compensating drawworks, growth in the immediate future with some
the highest‑rated in the world, as well as topdrives forecasts predicting the region will account for
and rotary tables were installed. The increased 75% of global floating-rig demand through 2027.
hoisting capacity will offer efficiencies, especially Oil prices, a key factor in forwarding drilling
when drilling programs and well configurations, programs, are around $80/bbl today and are
such as high‑pressure/high-temperature wells, expected to remain robust. Goldman Sachs
require the handling of heavy, large-diameter maintained its $86/bbl Brent forecast for
casing strings.” December 2023, and it expects prices to rise
Today, the Deepwater Titan is working in the to $93 in the second quarter next year as supply
US Gulf of Mexico (GOM) under a 5-year contract deficits continue.
with Chevron, while the Deepwater Atlas is also With utilization and day rates pressing the
in the GOM, working through the fall of 2024 for issue, deepwater drilling contractors are still
Beacon Offshore. expected to keep any plans for newbuilds in
check. Inflation headwinds and other economic
Looking Out, Looking Up hurdles mixed with the predicted arrival of peak
Demand for deepwater rigs is expected to oil demand in the next decade is expected drive
remain strong for both high-end drillships and deepwater drillers to operate within the confines
semisubmersibles. Utilization has returned to of the existing global fleet. JPT

jpt.spe.org 41
TotalEnergies
Drills Lebanon’s Qana
Prospect Amid New Global
Interest in EastMed Gas
PAT DAVIS SZYMCZAK, Contributing Editor

The Transocean Barents

semisubmersible drilling rig which
was scheduled to begin exploration
drilling on Lebanon’s Qana prospect
in September. Source: Transocean.

42 JPT | September 2023


A
s of September, TotalEnergies together
with partners Eni and QatarEnergy
will have spud exploration well
31/1 on Block 9 of Lebanon’s Qana
prospect. It is the consortium’s second attempt
in 6 years to strike gas in the EastMed where
upstream riches at the crossroads of markets east
and west struggle against the fiercest of global
geopolitical headwinds.
Lebanese media hailed the 16 August arrival
of the Transocean Barents semisubmersible drilling
platform at Block 9 with guarded optimism,
reporting on the Barents journey from the North
Sea like a sports play-by-play, detailing the landing
of the first crew transport helicopter and the
offloading of pipe and other equipment delivered
by ship to the Port of Beirut.
The Lebanese Petroleum Administration busily
dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on the drilling
license application that TotalEnergies EP Lebanon
had submitted in June while MP Ibrahim Kanaan,
head of the parliament’s finance and budget
committee, announced creation of the Lebanese
Sovereign Fund for Oil and Gas to protect future
revenues from political interference.
“The rig will start working in Lebanon in
September ... before the end of the year we will
know if there is a discovery,” Lebanon’s caretaker
Energy Minister Walid Fayyad told Reuters at an
event earlier this summer in Abu Dhabi.
Built to operate in harsh environments, the
Barents will drill in deep water, its crew hoping
to hit the sweet spot that is the Tamar Sands
Formation from which Israel, Cyprus, and Egypt
are producing gas or developing fields for
domestic needs and for export.
Assuming commercial gas reserves are
confirmed in Qana, Lebanon will join the club
of EastMed gas producers—a development that
would ease Beirut’s seemingly endless energy
crisis, give the financially bankrupt country a share
of revenues for gas exported to Europe and Asia,
and attract further global investment. The World
Bank has described Lebanon’s economic collapse
FEATURE | EastMed Gas
as possibly one of the top three most severe
worldwide since the 1850s.
But while all seems like business as usual,
this is the EastMed where political and military
conflicts that dog oil and gas projects throughout
the world can escalate quickly, driven by political
fragmentation and violence within and across
borders of countries with the most to gain from
big international projects.
What might be called a harsh environment in
the UK sector of the North Sea where the Barents
worked most recently differs greatly from what can
be called harsh in the EastMed where technology
can’t solve all of a hydrocarbon project’s problems.
Drawing Lines in the Sand
Beirut awarded exploration licenses in 2017 to
drill on its offshore Blocks 4 and 9 to the Total-
lead consortium with Eni and, at the time, Russia’s
independent gas producer and LNG exporter
Novatek. This past January, QatarEnergy farmed in
for a 30% stake after Novatek exited.
TotalEnergies and Eni each now hold 35%.
In the 6 years following the license award, the
consortium drilled only one well on the Lebanese
shelf—a dry hole on Block 4 in 2020. Though
data suggested that the Qana prospect in Block 9
might be different, TotalEnergies delayed further
appraisal drilling pending settlement of the
maritime boundary between Israel and Lebanon.
An agreement was reached in October 2022
when the two nations, at war for decades and
having no diplomatic relations with each other,
signed a US-brokered deal to split Qana between
them. At the same time, TotalEnergies pledged
to act as middleman, working exclusively with
Lebanon as regards control of Qana but managing
financial relations with Israel should commercially
viable gas reserves be confirmed.
“As for the general geology, the Qana prospect
belongs to the Levantine basin/zone so it should be
of similar geological layers to a certain extent (to
that of Block 4),” according to Kamel Bou-Hamdan,
assistant professor at Beirut Arab University. “Block
jpt.spe.org 43
 FEATURE | EastMed Gas

contract at a rate of
$365,000 (per day) plus
three one-well options
at rates that may vary
between $350,000 and
$390,000,” according to
Transocean’s quarterly
fleet status report.
If the consortium
succeeds, Lebanese
energy authorities will
again extend their bid
round for another eight
exploration blocks for
Commercial quantities of EastMed gas currently coming from Israel, Egypt, and which there have so far
Cyprus. Source: Atlantic Council Issue Brief, Energy and Geopolitics in the Eastern
been no takers, Minister
Mediterranean, February 2022.
Fayyad has said.
On Israel’s side of the
4 was drilled through a thick salt layer of around maritime border, Energean, a UK-Israeli-listed E&P
1 km thickness … using an S-shaped directional independent, is using its own (and the EastMed’s
profile which can be useful in avoiding some faulty only) floating production, storage, and offloading
or problematic zones.” (FPSO) facility, Energean Power, to produce the
A member of the TWA Editorial Committee, Karish field.
Bou‑Hamdan described those problems in an article Like TotalEnergies did in Lebanon, Energean
published in The Way Ahead as bit-balling, wellbore slow walked its Israeli project, waiting for security
erosion, well-control issues, and salt creep, all reasons to bring production on stream until
problems related to drilling for hydrocarbons both nations agreed who would own what.
(in this case mainly gas) that are trapped in a Energean did busy itself, however, with the prep
carbonate formation topped by a thick layer of salt, work so that first gas flowed from Karish on
further complicated by ultradeep water. 26 October 2022, only 4 days after the border
He also cited OTC 19880, Pre-Salt Santos deal was announced.
Basin—Challenges and New Technologies for the Energean completed installation of a gas
Development of the Pre-Salt Cluster, Santos Basin, export riser in March to enable the FPSO to reach
Brazil, as relevant to conditions found in the its 8 Bcm/year nameplate capacity. By year-end
Levantine basin. 2023, the company expects to complete its second
oil train to boost liquids production to around
Playing Hide and Seek With the Tamar 32,000 BOPD.
Sands Formation Meanwhile, a network of deepwater tiebacks
Having struck out on Block 4 to the north, is being fashioned to link the Energean Power to
TotalEnergies and its partners must find other fields within a 55-km radius including Karish
commercial quantities of gas on Block 9 to North, the Tanin field, and the Olympus Area in
confirm that Lebanon does indeed share in the Block 12 which has been renamed Katlan (the
mother lode that is the Tamar Sands Formation. Hebrew word for orca, colloquially known as a
TotalEnergies awarded Transocean “a one-well killer whale).

44 JPT | September 2023


The company is now finalizing a development
plan to submit to Israeli authorities, detailing how
it will exploit Katlan’s 68 Bcm of estimated gas
reserves. In March, Energean also reported first gas
from its offshore North El Amriya and North Idku
project in Egypt.
Israel kicked off deepwater pre-salt exploration
in 2003 on its own shelf by drilling the Hannah-1
dry hole, according to an abstract from the
American Association of Petroleum Geologists
(AAPG) book, Giant Fields of the Decade 2000–2010.
Five years later, Israel rebooted its campaign,
“resulting in gas discoveries at Tamar, Dalit,
Leviathan, Dolphin, Tanin, Aphrodite, Karish, and
Tamar Southwest. The main pre-salt play area likely
extends nearly 30,000 km2 (11,583 sq mi) in water
depths of approximately 1300 to 1700 m (4,265 to
5,577 ft) in the exclusive economic zones of Egypt,
Israel, Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria,” according to
the AAPG publication.
But so far, only Egypt, Israel, and Cyprus are
successfully developing any of their EastMed
prospects into producing assets, some ranked
among the world’s largest deepwater discoveries.
Writing 2 months after Lebanon delimited
its border with Israel, Middle East Eye (MEE), an
independently funded London-based news
site, noted that even rougher waters might lie
ahead with Syria at the center of a possibly
developing storm.
With Israel and Lebanon having etched
their lines in the sand with US help, Cyprus
can now settle its border with Beirut without
upsetting Israel.
However, Syria ultimately has a say because
“the maritime zones of Lebanon, Syria, and Cyprus
are linked by one point,” MEE pointed out in an
analysis of the 2022 delimitation. While this doesn’t
affect development of Qana, it could stymie
Lebanon’s ability to attract investment in the
eight other blocks it wants to license.
It is there that Qatar and QatarEnergy as a
partner with TotalEnergies and Eni in Lebanon
might intervene in the deal making.
FEATURE | EastMed Gas
Manifold module tie-in installation on Israel’s Karish
field. Source: Energean.
Navigating the EastMed’s Troubled Waters
Arab investment in EastMed Israeli waters became
possible only in August 2020 with the signing of the
aptly named Abraham Accords which normalized
diplomatic relations between Israel, the UAE,
Bahrain, and Morocco. Sudan followed suit in
February of this year.
Because Qatar declined to sign the Abraham
Accords, Doha has the flexibility to play a special
role in sensitive negotiations with countries
that remain in open conflict with Israel—most
importantly Lebanon and Syria.
Qatar has room to maneuver also with Turkey,
another willing mediator with ambitions to become
a gas hub for the EastMed considering that Ankara
is a gateway into southern Europe for pipeline gas
from the Caspian and Black seas.
A skeptic on this matter, Carole Nakhle, CEO
at London-based Crystol Energy, wrote in an
email, “Egypt stands a better chance than Turkey
to become a gas hub. That has been Turkey’s
ambition for decades, but its role has been
limited to a transit route apart from its large
domestic market.”
Qatar had broken diplomatic ties with Israel in
2009 over the conflict in Gaza, but the Washington-
DC based Middle East Institute notes that the
Qatari government has maintained a practical
jpt.spe.org 45
 FEATURE | EastMed Gas
Of the many maritime borders debated since 2011,
the US-brokered agreement centers on Line 23, which
places the Karish gas field in Israeli waters and offers
both Israel and Lebanon access to the Qana gas field.
Source: Arab Center Washington DC, adapted from maps
released by the Lebanese Armed Forces.
“under-the-radar working relationship” with Israel,
as does Oman.
Qatar is in fact the only country currently
investing in Lebanon and is even trying to help its
defunct banking sector. QatarEnergy’s farm-in to
the Qana consortium when no other international
energy company offered to acquire Novatek’s
abandoned share is but one example.
Abraham Accords in Israeli Waters
As for the Abraham Accords, the peace agreement
bore its first fruits in April 2021 when Abu Dhabi’s
state-owned Mubadala Petroleum (now Mubadala
Energy) announced its intent to purchase Delek
Drilling’s stake in Israel’s Tamar gas field for
$1.1 billion.
Mubadala currently holds 11% in Tamar with
operator Chevron Mediterranean Ltd. controlling
25%. Israeli partners include Isramco (28.75%),
Tamar Petroleum (16.75%), Tamar Investment 2
(11%), Dor Gas (4%), and Everest (3.5%).
In December 2022, the Abu Dhabi company
joined Chevron and its other partners in taking
46 JPT | September 2023
a final investment decision (FID) of $673 million
to lay a third pipeline to the Tamar production
platform to boost production incrementally
while also negotiating new sales agreements
with Egypt.
Chevron is making similar moves at the
Leviathan gas field which it also operates, and
its biggest Israeli partner, NewMed Energy,
with a majority 45.34% stake, may in the
not‑too-distant future be inviting the Abu Dhabi
National Oil Company (ADNOC) and BP into an
expanded partnership.
In March, ADNOC and BP agreed to explore a
possible purchase of 50% of shares in NewMed,
a subsidiary of Delek Group, and to take the
company private
If this happens, Abu Dhabi will be well
positioned in the EastMed with stakes in Israel’s
two most-prolific gas reservoirs which currently
supply regional needs and are executing plans to
expand production for LNG export.
Leviathan is the Mediterranean’s largest
natural gas reservoir with an estimated 622 Bcm
in reserves. Israeli’s Ratio Energies is also a partner
with a 15% stake with Chevron Mediterranean Ltd.
holding 39.66%.
The announcement of NewMed’s possible
tie up with ADNOC and BP came only a month
after the Israeli company and Chevron unveiled a
$45-million plan to expand Leviathan’s production
and to invest $51.5 million in developing a
6.5 Bcm/year capacity floating liquefaction facility
(FLNG) that would operate in Israeli waters.
Leviathan supplies the 12 Bcm/year of
gas it currently produces to Israel, Egypt, and
Jordan. The project’s Phase 1A was designed to
eventually raise gas output 43% to 21 Bcm/year
by adding modules to existing facilities, according
to NewMed.
Chevron and NewMed took a first step in this
direction when they announced in July a FID to
invest $568 million to lay a third pipeline on the
Leviathan field to gather an additional 2 Bcm/year
of gas starting in late 2025.
 FEATURE | EastMed Gas

Probable Reserves Discovery

Gas Field Status
(billion cubic meters) Date

Tamar, Israel 280 2009 Producing

West Nile Delta, Egypt 142 2010 Producing
Leviathan, Israel 622 2010 Producing
Aphrodite, the RoC 127 2011 Pursuing gas sales
Tanin, Israel 37 2011 Producing
Karish, Israel 28–42 2013 Producing
Zohr, Egypt 845 2015 Producing
Calypso 1, the RoC 170–227 2018 Discovered in January 2018
Glaucus-1, the RoC 142–227 2019 Discovered in February 2019
Israeli gas fields and offshore blocks. Source: Energean.

Phase B envisions the export of LNG to Europe
and to Asia via the Suez Canal, with liquefaction
taking place at one or both of Egypt’s two existing
LNG facilities or by developing NewMed’s own
FLNG capability.
The Jerusalem Post observed in a 12 July article
that “commercial and technical bottlenecks”
encountered once Israeli gas arrives in Egypt, plus
the limited capacity of Cairo’s two liquefaction
plants, argue for Israel to diversify its gas export
options by anchoring an FLNG facility in the
country’s offshore exclusive economic zone.
Meanwhile, Chevron and NewMed may
need to add such multivector thinking to
deliberations over the development plan for
the Aphrodite field on Block 12 offshore Cyprus,
which Cypriot authorities rejected in a 25 August
letter to Chevron Cyprus Ltd. The government’s
letter noted that the development plan to
bring Aphrodite gas on stream speaks only of
constructing a subsea pipeline and connections to
existing infrastructure in Egypt, minus any mention
of other options such as installation of an FLNG
facility near Aphrodite.
China Petroleum Pipeline Engineering Co. has
again delayed delivery of a floating storage and
regasification unit (FSRU) to be sited at an LNG
import terminal at the Cypriot Port of Vassilikos
and nearby power station. Originally due to be
delivered by October, the Chinese contractor now
promises to complete the project by July 2024, the
Cyprus Mail reported this summer. Besides delivery
of the FSRU, the EUR 300-million project includes
a jetty, pipeline and mooring facilities, and related
offshore and onshore infrastructure.
An EU grant will finance a third of the cost
with remaining finance coming from the European
Investment Bank and the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development. JPT
FOR FURTHER READING
OTC 19880 Pre-Salt Santos Basin—Challenges and
New Technologies for the Development of the
Pre-Salt Cluster, Santos Basin, Brazil by Ricardo
L. Carneiro Beltrao, Cristiano Leite Sombra, and
Antonio Carlos V.M. Lage, et al., Petrobras.
The Tamar Giant Gas Field: Opening the Sub-
Salt Miocene Gas Play in the Levant Basin
by Daniel L. Needham, Henry S. Pettingill, and
Christopher J. Christensen, Noble Energy Inc., et al.
The American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
IPTC 21893 The Ionian-Crete Basin: Is This the
Next Frontier? by Farisa M. Zaffa, Amir Ayub,
and Shahram Sherkati, et al., Petronas.
Isolated Carbonate Platforms of the
Mediterranean and Their Seismic Expression—
Searching for a Paradigm by Giovanni Rusciadelli
and Peter Shiner, University of Chieti-Pescara,
The Leading Edge, SEG.

jpt.spe.org 47
 CASE STUDY
Conductor-Integrity Monitoring in Subsea Wells
in Harsh Environments
Harald Holden, 4Subsea
A
decade-long project to monitor
drilling operations on subsea wells
in harsh environments has delivered
interesting results.
Subsea production and exploration
wells are subjected to loads from the drilling riser
and subsea blowout preventors (BOP). The latter
have grown in size and weight over time, resulting
in larger wellhead loads.
The main task of a subsea conductor is to
transfer these loads into the seabed. The bending
load applied on the wellhead is transferred into the
conductor, which again transfers the loads through
the cement and into the soil.
In cases where the load exerted on the soil and
cement exceeds the capacity, the soil around the
conductor might fail. The cement filling the cavity
SMS Gyro Sensor x 2
• Autonomous 6-axis sensor
accelerometer and
gyroscope
• 3000 m rating
• Continuous 10 Hz sampling
1 year battery capacity
• Master-slave configuration
of 3 sensors
SMS Strain Sensor
• Autonomous uniaxial
strain sensor for direct
load measurements
• 3000 m rating
• Continuous 10 Hz sampling
1 year battery capacity
Fig. 1—A typical SWIM sensor setup.
48 JPT | September 2023
between the conductor and the soil can also crack
and consequently lose its intended function. This
support degradation reduces the conductor’s
ability to support the well.
4Subsea’s Subsea Wellhead Integrity
Monitoring (SWIM) service for operations on
subsea wells has now been in action for more
than a decade. Sensors monitoring the motion
and loads near the subsea wellhead have been
mounted on more than 300 drilling campaigns
(Fig. 1). In recent years, more than 70% of the
drilling operations with semisubmersible drilling
rigs on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) have
been monitored using SWIM.
As a part of the service, integrity parameters
showing whether the conductor gives the
intended amount of support are calculated. A
major finding is that loss of conductor support
during drilling operations has been observed in
several of these campaigns, with different integrity
issues detected.
In at the Deep End
Wells in the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, and
the Barents Sea are often developed as subsea
fields. The typical setup while drilling these wells
utilizes a mobile drilling unit (semisubmersible or
drillship) with a marine riser and subsea BOP. The
well foundation must be designed to withstand the
imposed loads.
In accordance with Norwegian Safety Authority
facility regulations, wells and their foundations
must follow strict regulations. These include that
the conductor shall provide structural integrity
of the well during its service life, and that it shall

be evaluated with respect to structural loads
and fatigue.
Subsea wells can be divided into two
categories based on the type of support of
the respective conductor.
• Supported conductors are the most-common
configuration for subsea production wells in
harsh environments, with a template structure
supporting the conductor.
• Unsupported conductors are used for
exploration and production wells in less-harsh
environments.
During well foundation design, there are
typically three different failure modes to consider.
• Extreme load failure (ULS, ALS) of the wellhead
system and supporting structures
• Fatigue failure (FLS) of the wellhead system
and supporting structure
• Failure of the soil support and cement around
the conductor
SWIM covers both fatigue monitoring and
detection of issues with the soil and cement support.
What Is SWIM?
The system consists of two motion sensors
and one strain-sensor kit. Each motion
sensor has a built-in accelerometer
and gyroscope so that it can measure
acceleration in the X, Y, and Z directions
and the angular velocity around the same
axes. The motion sensors are placed
right above and below the lower flex joint
whereas the strain sensors are located
near the wellhead connector. The strain-
sensor kit consists of four sensors placed
around the circumference of the BOP to
measure the strain of the metal on which
they are placed, enabling calculation of the
bending moment directly.
CASE STUDY
A Guide to Loss of Well Support
The conductor pipe is the outermost casing
string in an offshore well and the main load-
bearing component for satellite wells. Its main
task is to provide structural support for the
rest of the well. Cement is applied between the
conductor and the wall of the hole to both isolate
the wellbore and to bond the casing firmly to the
wall of the hole.
This system is designed so that the loads that
the lower stack and wellhead are subjected to will
be transferred through the conductor and cement
into the soil. This way, only the upper parts of the
casings are exposed to the greater part of these
loads. Loss of well support can occur from failure
of the soil or the cement around the conductor,
which occurs when the applied loads exceed
the capacity.
This will typically be a propagating effect that
starts near the mudline where the conductor
bending loads are high. If the process continues,
a trumpet-shaped hole might open around the
conductor, and the structural support around the
conductor could be lost (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2—Illustration of soil and cement support around
an unsupported conductor. An intact well is shown on
the left, and a well with a fully developed trumpet-
shaped hole is shown on the right.
jpt.spe.org 49
 CASE STUDY
Fig. 3—An example of a well with Category 1 soil or
cement failure.
This could lead to the lower part of the
conductor being exposed to increased dynamic
loads compared to an intact system. This part of
the conductor typically isn’t designed for such an
increase in the loads, and it may lead to structural
or fatigue failure in the conductor.
A common way to try to mitigate loss of
conductor support is to dump gravel around the
well. Early detection through use of a monitoring
system is important for this to be successful, and
gravel dumping is difficult if the conductor motions
become too large.
Another way to mitigate loss of conductor
support is to install wellhead-load relief systems.
This can be done both preventatively and
reactively, but it is an expensive solution and must
be planned for up front.
Findings From a Decade of Monitoring
Over the course of the campaign, wells with
soil‑support issues were separated into
two categories.
• Category 1 covers cases where soil support
deteriorates throughout drilling operations.
These are typically wells where the soil/cement
is exposed to loads outside its capacity,
propagating soil deterioration as a result.
50 JPT | September 2023
Fig. 4—An example of a Category 2 failure showing low
stiffness at the time of BOP landing.
• Category 2 contains cases when low stiffness
and/or a deep point of rotation is observed
from when the BOP lands. This typically covers
cases where the soil support is significantly
lower than indicated by the soil survey or
where the initial cement job has failed.
In case of a Category 2 instability, the
soil support around the conductor is already
compromised at the time the BOP lands on the
wellhead. Whereas for Category 1, large loads
are believed to wear out the cement and/or soil
around the conductor.
An example of a well with failure in Category 1
is summarized in Fig. 3. After SWIM detected
several shifts in the integrity parameters, a
remotely operated vehicle (ROV) was sent down
for inspection. Following the first shift on day 4,
the ROV observed cracks in the cement around the
conductor. After the next shift on day 23, further
cracks were observed. On day 27, the ROV started
dumping gravel around to help stiffen the well.
Vast improvement in integrity parameters were
seen quickly, and the stiffness stabilized close to
the original level.
Fig. 4 is an example of a Category 2 well. In this
instance, both the rotational length and the natural
 CASE STUDY

Among the 167 wells monitored at water

Water Depth Instability
depths between 150 and 500 m, soil support issues
Well Location (m) Conductor Category
A North Sea 100–110 Unsupported 1
were detected in just two. In both cases, the issues
were present from the beginning of operations.
B North Sea 110–120 Unsupported 1
Thirty-six of the 167 wells had unsupported
C North Sea 90–100 Unsupported 1
conductors, corresponding to soil issues occurring
D North Sea 120–130 Unsupported 2 in 6% of the monitored unsupported wells at water
E
Norwegian
340–350 Unsupported 2 depths between 150 and 500 m.
Sea
It is worth noting that conductor instabilities
F North Sea 120–130 Unsupported 2
are mainly observed for wells without template
G North Sea 90–100 Unsupported 1
support. Supported conductors can transfer
H North Sea 90–100 Unsupported 2 most of the load to the support structure, and
I North Sea 120–130 Unsupported 1 failure in cement or soil is less likely. Among
J Barents Sea 370–380 Unsupported 2 the 48 monitored shallow-water (depth below
150 m) unsupported conductors, instabilities were
K North Sea 110–120 Unsupported 2
detected in nine cases. This corresponds to 19% of
Table 1—Summary of observed operations with loss of
the unsupported conductors in shallow water. JPT
cement/soil support.

FOR FURTHER READING

period estimates are very large from the beginning.
In this case, the sensors above and below the lower OMAE2022-81117 Conductor Instability—
flex joint (LFJ) reported the same angles the first Experience From 10 Years of Monitoring
few days. For example, the well stiffness was so low Drilling Operations on Subsea Wells in Harsh
that all the riser motion/energy was transferred Environments by Håkon Molven, Per Kristian
through the LFJ and down into the well. More of the Pöcher, Vegard Martinsen, and Harald Holden,
conductor was exposed to large loads as the soil 4Subsea.
support started further down the well, leading to
fatigue loading in cross sections not designed for AUTHOR
these loads. In this case gravel dumping around
the conductor was also the remedy, and the well Harald Holden is lead engineer
stiffness stabilized after around 15 days. at 4Subsea within the area
The wells monitored with SWIM where of drilling and wellhead
instability issues have been detected are systems. He has more than
summarized in Table 1. It should be noted that for 20 years of experience in the
all the wells in this list, the well operations were oil and gas industry and holds
completed as planned. This was enabled by the a master’s degree in mechanical
SWIM monitoring service both detecting the issue engineering from the Norwegian
and verifying the effect of the mitigating actions. University of Science and Technology.

jpt.spe.org 51
 TECHNOLOGY FOCUS

Reservoir Surveillance
Muhammad Navaid Khan, SPE, Senior Specialist for Advanced Reservoir Solutions, ADNOC

T
he energy transition and global
geopolitical situation present numerous
oil and gas operators with opportunities
to accelerate production growth and
monetize hydrocarbon resources. While rapid
production growth comes with proportional
risks, it becomes crucial for reservoir surveillance
engineers to quickly identify, derisk, and mitigate
subsurface performance uncertainties. In this
demanding scenario, the need for high-frequency
reservoir performance surveillance is more critical
than ever. Fortunately, advanced technologies
have emerged as a refuge for subsurface engineers
facing these challenges.
One such technology is fiber optics, which has
matured significantly over the past two decades,
allowing for real-time well-performance overviews
in various applications. This capability enhances
well-management efficiency and enables prompt
“Embracing advanced
technologies is vital for oil
and gas operators to optimize
production, reduce risks, and
make informed decisions in the
evolving energy landscape.”
corrective actions, as demonstrated in papers
SPE 200088 and SPE 200806.
Along similar lines, the dynamic nature of the
industry has also driven subsurface practitioners to
think innovatively and apply existing technologies
for out-of-the-box solutions. For instance,
tracers, traditionally used for understanding
subsurface connectivity, are now being used
to calibrate surface networks and optimize gas

MUHAMMAD NAVAID KHAN, SPE, is the senior specialist for advanced

Muhammad Navaid Khan
Senior Specialist for Advanced
Reservoir Solutions
ADNOC
reservoir solutions at the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company
(ADNOC). He has nearly two decades of expertise in diverse Middle
Eastern fields. He holds a master’s graduate degree in petroleum
engineering from Heriot-Watt University. At ADNOC, he leads
digital transformation initiatives for efficient integrated reservoir
management. Khan has been involved with SPE as a mentor, section
chair, technical judge, and author of technical papers. He was
honored with the 2015 SPE Regional Service Award for the Middle
East and North Africa Region. Khan is a member of the JPT Editorial
Review Board and can be reached at mnavaid@adnoc.ae.

52 JPT | September 2023


lift injection performance. Such unconventional
approaches have been explored in paper
SPE 207431, highlighting their effectiveness. In
addition to tracers, technologists are turning
rock cuttings, often considered mere waste,
into valuable information. As demonstrated
by paper SPE 206214, these insights aid in
elucidating depositional sequences and fluid-
migration paths, thereby facilitating better field
development decisions.
Furthermore, technology groups are working
on innovative solutions that use advanced sensing
and artificial-intelligence (AI) -based technologies.
As a result, interventionless downhole pressure
and temperature surveying are no longer distant
dreams (paper IPTC 22255). In another example,
the power of AI has elevated sensing intuition,
optimizing reservoir and fluid characterizing
operations and leading to improved drilling-cost
efficiency and the quality of well delivery (paper
SPE 210091).
Embracing advanced technologies is vital for oil
and gas operators to optimize production, reduce
risks, and make informed decisions in the evolving
energy landscape. From real-time fiber optic
monitoring to unconventional tracer applications
and AI-driven solutions, reservoir surveillance
engineers now have an array of tools at their
disposal to drive the industry toward a more
efficient and sustainable future. JPT
TECHNOLOGY FOCUS
Recommended additional reading at OnePetro:
www.onepetro.org.
SPE 200806
An Industry Overview of Downhole Monitoring
Using Distributed Temperature Sensing:
Fundamentals and 2 Decades Deployment
in Oil and Gas Industries
by Mohammad Soroush, RGL Reservoir Management,
et al.
SPE 206214
Reservoir Architecture and Fluid Connectivity
in an Abu Dhabi Oil Accumulation
by Erik Tegelaar, Triple EEE, et al.
IPTC 22255
Sensor Ball: Field Deployment of Autonomous
and Untethered Surveillance
by Mohamed Larbi Zeghlache, Saudi Aramco, et al.
SPE 211543
The Sensor Ball Revolutionizes Wireline
Operations
by Nasser M. Al-Hajri, Saudi Aramco, et al.
jpt.spe.org 53
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Reservoir Surveillance
Study Reviews Two Decades of Surveillance
Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing
Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) through fiber
optics has been deployed in downhole monitoring
for over 2 decades. The complete paper reviews
the basics of DAS, fiber types, installation methods,
types of recorded data, data processing, historical
development, current applications, and limitations
of the technology, providing a concise review
using several field cases from more than 200
published SPE papers and journal databases.
Because this synopsis cannot retain these many
paper references or their overview, readers
are encouraged to access the complete paper
on OnePetro.
DAS Fundamentals
DAS Units. DAS systems consist of an interrogator
that includes a laser transmitter and detector, a
processing unit, and a distributed sensing fiber.
Laser pulses are sent periodically into the fiber that
is installed in the medium. The detector records
backscattered response vs. time along the fiber.
Because an acoustic field exerts pressure
on the fiber it surrounds, some strain is induced
on the fiber. An interrogator is sensitive to this
strain between two points of fiber separated by
gauge length.
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter,
contains highlights of paper SPE 200088, “Downhole
Monitoring Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing: Fundamentals
and Two Decades of Deployment in Oil and Gas Industries,” by
Mohammad Soroush and Mohammad Mohammadtabar,
RGL Reservoir Management and University of Alberta, and
Morteza Roostaei, RGL Reservoir Management, et al. The
paper has not been peer reviewed.
54 JPT | September 2023
Multi- and Single-Mode Fibers. Generally,
multimode fibers are used for distributed
temperature sensing (DTS) and single-mode
fibers are used for DAS. Multimode fibers have
a larger-diameter core through which multiple
modes of light can pass, while, in single mode,
only one mode of light passes through the
core. Attenuation in single-mode fiber is lower;
therefore, single mode is suitable for long
distances. On the other hand, multimode fiber
can pass more data through the fiber and has
higher attenuation.
Data Type and Processing. Previous authors
described how to reduce, convert, and transmit
DAS recordings as data acquisition accumulates
over time at the site without losing significant
information. They also established three methods
of data reviewing: local, remote display (from
a remote server), and post-job integration
(displaying all available data).
A work flow of main steps for using DAS and
DTS includes data gathering, auxiliary data, quality
control and assurance, data management, and
determination of interpretation options. Live data
can be made available in permanent installations,
while analytics libraries can be integrated into
cloud-based DAS system. This will result in (nearly)
real-time decision-making and easy-to-use
forms of data.
For a limited time, the complete
paper is free to SPE members
at jpt.spe.org.
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Reservoir Surveillance
Multicomponent DAS. Because DAS systems are
more sensitive in an axial direction, to estimate
strain tensor, a multicomponent DAS was proposed
with two approaches: multiple parallel or helix
optical fiber. Another configuration was proposed
with five helical fibers with equal space and one
straight fiber for shorter wavelengths, addressing
a limitation of previous methods.
Seismic Profiling
DAS data have been used to extract seismic
information or as a comparison with seismic data.
For instance, some companies use DAS data for
vertical seismic profiling (VSP). VSP refers to seismic
attributes measured by receivers in the well while
the source is on the surface. DAS-VSP data can
be matched with geophone VSP data using depth
calibration (two calibration points). DAS in deep
water (Gulf of Mexico) can be a cost-effective
technique for 4D VSP. Other authors reported that
DAS can be used as a safe and cost-effective tool for
VSP in a variety of wells with complex overburden
and wells that are inaccessible to geophones.
DAS-VSP data have been used to evaluate
medium local anisotropy. By using walkaway VSP,
vertical slowness in vertical wells and horizontal
slowness in horizontal wells can be estimated.
Consequently, slowness vector and anisotropy
can be assessed.
This section of the complete paper details a
number of studies in which DAS was compared with
geophone methods. Some authors recommended
a combination of the techniques, while others
stated that DAS shows dense channel advantage.
A comparison of offshore DAS-VSP (one in Trinidad
offshore and one in the Gulf of Mexico) with
oceanbottom nodes, ocean bottom cable (OBC),
and seismic images arrived at the conclusion that
DAS-VSP results have higher resolution than OBC
in Trinidad and higher coverage than VSP with
geophones in the Gulf of Mexico.
Advantages of DAS over geophones include
the following:
• Low cost
• Simple infrastructure
• Light weight and simple installation
• Large depth of reach
• Continuous real-time logging
• High resolution of samples less than 50 cm
and 10 kHz
• Ability to work in high temperatures and harsh
chemical environments
Microseismic Monitoring: Hydraulic
Fracturing Characterization
DAS applications in unconventional reservoirs
before and after hydraulic fracture stimulation
have been investigated as well. Authors have
emphasized that permanent installation of
fiber behind casing results in high repeatability
of the surveys. DAS also can be used for
microseismic-event detection; while less sensitive
when compared with geophone methods, it is
nonintrusive. DAS data can be used to estimate
microseismic-event location and hydraulic
diffusivity because microseismic relates to low-
frequency strain records. DAS microseismic-
event identification was compared with the
performance of geophones in the same application
for a hydraulic fracturing case study. The authors
reported that advantages of DAS included
the following:
• Data record over the field life
• Close distance to the fracture
• No need for observation wells
• Reduction of health and safety risks
• Suitability for high temperature and pressure
On the other hand, the following disadvantages
of DAS also were identified:
• Less sensitivity
• Dependency of the receiver on direction
• Difficulty in identifying event locations with a
lack of multiple component fibers
One of the problems of DAS is insensitivity
of fiber to perpendicular strains. Therefore,
complexity can be added to the fiber geometry
jpt.spe.org 55
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Reservoir Surveillance
and a 3D-wave elastic model used to better capture
microseismic events.
DAS can be applied during in-well operations,
hydraulic fracturing, and flowback to assess
stimulation and enhance post-job performance.
More specifically, DAS is used to achieve
the following:
• Capture dynamic changes in hydraulic fracture
treatment
• Optimize placement of proppant and fluid
during real-time treatment
• Assess the distribution efficiency of limited-
entry designs
• Save costs during real-time treatment and
post-treatment jobs
This section of the complete paper details specific
studies devoted to DAS in a variety of fracture-
characterization and -stimulation applications that
also compare DAS with other methods such as
geophone, DTS, and radioactive tracers.
Flow Monitoring
Experiments using DAS and fiber Bragg grating
(FBG) have correlated flow rate to FBG wavelength
as well as turbulent flow to DAS amplitude
fluctuations. FBG is a distributed Bragg reflector in
a short segment of fiber that only reflects specific
wavelengths of light.
DAS and DTS can be used for production and
injection flow-rate profiling across and behind
casing, which is not possible with production
logging tools. DAS also can be combined with
DTS for wellbore and reservoir surveillance—
specifically, examples of single-phase injection-
rate profiling during water and polymer injection,
tight-gas producer rate profiling, and liquid
production profiling with inflow control valves
and wax buildup.
Researchers have stated that two velocities
will be extracted from DAS data: velocity of
thermal or acoustic slugs that travel through the
well with the speed of a few meters per second
and velocity related to the speed of sound in the
56 JPT | September 2023
fluids. They said that bulk flow can be determined
by slug tracking and that fluid composition can
be determined by speed-of-sound tracking. They
used tight-gas producer data for the former and
experimental flow-loop, test-well, and oil-producer
with gas lift data for the latter.
Robust regression techniques such as least
absolute deviation have been used to correlate
acoustic data frequency-band extracted to flow
rate. This robust technique is less affected by
outliers. A band-switching method then can be
used to maintain model quality.
DAS and DTS data and multilayer perceptron
neural networks have been used to estimate gas
flow rate in Marcellus shale. An algorithm using
DAS, DTS, geoscience, completion, and log data
was later proposed to predict gas production
in Marcellus shale. These authors used random
forest (RF), artificial neural network, and support
vector machine methods and found that DAS data
is an important parameter for prediction. They
discovered that RF had the highest accuracy and
less computational time and cost.
This section of the complete paper describes
studies that have explored the use of DAS in phase
determination, steam and gas flow, gas lift and
electrical-submersible-pump surveillance, flow-
control-device performance, sand production, and
flow-regime determination.
Conclusions
Based on a detailed review of papers investigated
in this study, DAS deployment results can be
categorized as qualitative and quantitative
methods. In qualitative methods, a new response
or change along the well or pipe can be identified.
In quantitative methods, the value of a property
such as flow rate can be determined. In the latter
method, more-sophisticated data processing is
needed to correlate acoustic signals to production
or injection-rate data. Signal-to-noise ratio should
be considered in the calculations, and (deep)
machine-learning methods should be employed.
Most of the publications in the literature are
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Reservoir Surveillance
qualitative, especially the ones related to flow
monitoring. To the best of the authors’ knowledge,
no comprehensive correlation exists between
flow data and DAS signals because of the complex
nature of such a correlation. Quantitative
approaches should be applied in future DAS
deployment to better understand and evaluate
reservoir and wellbore performance.
In addition, the following conclusions and
statements can be extracted from the review of
the literature:
• DAS signals are based on Rayleigh scatter, for
which the scattered photons have the same
energy as the incident photons.
• DAS usually is deployed with single-mode
fibers. Use of multimode fibers is possible, but
the signals will be noisier.
• Mentioned fiber installations have advantages
and disadvantages, but, generally, most DAS
deployments have low cost and health and
safety risks and record real-time data along
the well.
• Processing methods are applied to reduce the
volume of DAS records.
• Multicomponent DAS is used for strain-tensor
evaluation because the fiber is sensitive to
axial direction.
• Seismic profiling (specifically, VSP) extracted
from DAS data is cheaper and has fewer
limitations, but signal-to-noise ratio should
be improved.
• DAS deployment has been successful in
hydraulic fracturing characterization and
optimization.
• Well and pipe integrity, leakage, and completion
efficiency can be assessed using DAS.
• Flow monitoring is one of the more important
objectives of DAS deployment. JPT
jpt.spe.org 57
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Reservoir Surveillance
Unconventional Use of Tracer Technology
Provides Flow Insights for EOR, IOR
In recent decades, tracers have provided crucial
insight into fluid-flow behavior in assessing
reservoir connectivity. While advancements
in versatility of tracer molecules have been
published before in the literature, to the best of the
authors’ knowledge, no work has been published
to date that discusses the latest advances in
unconventional uses of tracer molecules aiding
enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and improved oil
recovery (IOR) processes. This work is meant to
address that gap by exploring four unconventional
uses of tracers that hold significant potential.
Microencapsulation of Solid Tracers:
Enhancing Intelligent Tracers
Previous research specified that factors affecting
the current technology of solid tracers include
physical space restrictions, temperature, tracer-
loading capacity, initial surge, release of the tracer
into fluid, and target-tracer concentrations.
While the first two factors often are dictated
by project conditions, advances in the other
factors have been largely attributed to the
tracer-polymer composition. For the tracers to
be released in a controlled manner across a
designated period, polymer structure plays a
pivotal role in achieving longevity.
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris
Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 207431,
“Advanced Research and Development in Unconventional
Use of Tracer Technology for EOR and IOR: What Lies
Beyond?” by Monalisa Chatterjee and Sean Toh, Tracerco,
and Ahmed Alshmakhy, SPE, ADNOC, et al. The paper has
not been peer reviewed.
58 JPT | September 2023
The complete paper discusses a technique
that is an application revolving around
microencapsulation of chemical tracers in a solid
shell before the addition of polymer material.
Encapsulation vs. Microencapsulation. The
encapsulation technique is a complex process
involving selection of compatible molecular
carriers, understanding their effects, and building
the appropriate encapsulation (usually molecular
encapsulation) to ensure that the capsules
meet the desired outcome of each study. In this
paper, an advanced subset of encapsulation—
microencapsulation—is presented and its
applications in inflow chemical tracing are discussed.
Microencapsulation involves a particle, usually
of micrometer dimensions, comprising a core
material surrounded by a wall material significantly
different from that of the core. The difference
between them mainly arises from the morphology
and the internal structure.
The process allows the active ingredient to be
protected from adverse external environmental
conditions by the encapsulating coating agent.
By applying the microencapsulation technique,
the release profiles of tracers can be further
controlled by changing the thickness, material,
and morphology of the encapsulating agent. When
applied onto tracers, this changes the tracer-
release mechanism to a two-step, instead of the
For a limited time, the complete
paper is free to SPE members
at jpt.spe.org.
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Reservoir Surveillance
Thermal Deposition
Chemical Tracer Resistant
Tracer Dispersion Polymers/
Monomers
Solid
Mix With
Core Shell
Chemicals To
Make Polymer Mix
Fig. 1—Steps showing synthesis of bead-frac tracers through microencapsulation, cryogenesis, and meshing.
typical one-step, process. Oil tracers that generally
are oleophilic will be released when in contact with
oil; similarly, water tracers that are hydrophilic will
be released when in contact with water. The tracers
will remain dormant until the phase of interest
encounters the polymer bars, and the two-step
process allows the encapsulating agent to further
improve the longevity of the tracers.
To further validate the encapsulation principle,
a range of tests has been applied to evaluate the
stability, release rate, and release patterns of each
tracer. The tests were performed across three
different formulations in a testing environment
that simulated reservoir conditions. The cumulative
release rate and concentration release of tracers
were taken as the main function of measurement
to determine tracer longevity.
The encouraging results for microencapsulation
treatment, detailed in the complete paper, have
made it possible to linearize the tracer-release
profiles, a development that has led to a substantial
increase in tracer lifetime. It has also been beneficial
in reducing the release rates of the tracers at
elevated reservoir-temperature conditions.
Slow-Release Bead-Frac Tracer
Technology for Extended Monitoring
Liquid molecular tracers, as well as solid
particulate tracers, can remain in producing
fluids for some time. In high-flowback wells,
however, their lifetimes can be relatively short.
Bead-frac tracers have been developed as an
Fusion and Solid
Solidification Core Shell
Chip Solid Tracer Polymer at
Polymer Correct Particle Size
advanced genre of the solid particulate tracer—a
cocktail of inflow and frac tracers—to assure an
extended lifetime. Designed to be phase-specific
and slow-release, they can be manufactured in
various mesh sizes. Being similar in dimension
to the proppants, they follow the path of the
proppants and sit alongside them, thus ensuring
target-zone placement. The beads far exceed
both standard Ottawa frac sand and ceramic
proppants in strength. The tracer is dispersed in
a suitable medium and microencapsulated within
a solid core shell polymer. The shell is mixed with
polymer and solidified to form a solid polymer-
microencapsulated tracer system. This is processed
to a desired mesh size (Fig. 1).
Effect of Temperature on Bead-Frac Tracers.
Both water and oil bead-frac tracers were
subjected to various temperature tests, and their
stability, dynamics of release, and lifetime were
studied over an extended period of time. Both
water and oil bead-frac tracers showed high
stability and a very long lifetime. The tracers also
did not display significant variations in release
dynamics in the studied range of temperatures.
Lifetime of Bead-Frac Tracers. Different mesh
sizes of water and oil bead-frac tracers at different
temperatures at 1,000 B/D flow rates were
assessed. The projected lifetimes of the tracers
showed that both the oil and water tracers can be
detected over long periods of zonal fluid flowback.
jpt.spe.org 59
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Reservoir Surveillance
Field Trial Results. A field trial with bead tracers
was sconducted with tracer production logs. The
data showed that all tracer positions for both
phases continued to produce tracer signatures
over an extended time period.
Topside Inflow Tracer Application
Topside application of inflow or smart tracers,
upgraded with advanced microencapsulated
technology, can decrease the time involved in the
process of sampling and reduce response time
when “sudden-death syndrome” sets in because
of rapidly increasing water production from a
well. This novel application of tracer technology
is patented by ADNOC, with one of the coauthors
of this paper being the inventor of this application.
Objective of the Study. The objective of
introducing this novel application was to detect
water production from the wells of Field A early
enough to be able to test them, understand the
water‑production trend, and act before the wells die.
The idea was to place polymer-based rods in
the flow line near the wellhead that would release
tracers when in contact with water. A unique tracer
signature would be chosen for each well. Sampling
would be performed typically every week, without
the need to travel to each wellhead. The detection
of a specific tracer would trigger the testing of the
well for confirmation, and the well could then be
put under close water-production monitoring.
Possible Deployment Options. Three possible
topside inflow-tracer-deployment ideas were
considered by the team.
• Option 1: Inclusion of tracers in the main flow
arm of individual wells
• Option 2: Inclusion of tracers in separate flow
chambers
• Option 3: Coupon-type flow-line insert
With zero loss of production and minimum
invasion to the existing upstream system, Option 2
seemed to be the most viable for implementation.
60 JPT | September 2023
An action plan for practical implementation and
integration of tracer chambers within the reservoir
system was established, including the following steps:
• Customize the tracer surface area and the
release rate of the tracers
• Establish the group of wells to be connected
and sampled together
• Design the tracer chamber
• Ascertain tapping points to connect the
chambers in the well-flow arm
On-Site Measurements
With Carbon Dots
Luminescent nanoparticles have recently
gained popularity as a potential tracing tool
for reservoir monitoring.
Quantum dots (QD) are semiconductor
nanoparticles. Most QDs are formed of heavy
metal ions posing harm to humans, limiting their
practical applications. In reservoir applications,
environmental concerns outweigh the offered
benefits of QDs unless they are otherwise coated
with an inert coating such as silica.
Carbon nanodots, also known as C-dots,
were developed to eradicate concerns of
environmental toxicity in oilfield applications.
Carbon dots are small carbon-based nanoparticles
that have been discovered to have useful
luminescent properties, particularly fluorescent
properties, as well as low toxicity and high
chemical stability.
The C-dots can be dispersed in an aqueous
media and injected into an injector well for
interwell marking and fracturing-fluid tracking.
Samples can be collected at surface, simply
filtered, and fed into a fluorometer to extract
the luminescence-response curves that can
be modified and analyzed qualitatively and
quantitatively. The enhanced stability of the
luminescence signal of the C-dot enables a
quantitative study. Additionally, the C-dots
have wavelengths of excitation and emission
that avoid the background fluorescence of oily
produced water. JPT
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Reservoir Surveillance
Focused Reservoir Fluid Sampling
Uses Artificial Intelligence Technology
Samples collected using wireline formation testing
(WFT) provide vital information throughout the
lifetime of a reservoir. Contaminated samples
can lead to erroneous fluid analysis results with
potentially huge economic consequences. A
need exists for an application that can assist
engineers in accurately inferring the state of fluid
contamination. The complete paper describes the
development of a WFT contamination-forewarning
application based on a framework that advises
real-time decisions regarding the state of fluid
contamination and recommending changes that
will help optimize the WFT operation.
Focused Fluid Sampling
During the past decade, focused fluid sampling has
emerged as a viable alternative to conventional
formation-fluid sampling. The method uses a
special probing tool containing two distinct flow
areas. The central (sample) inlet is connected to
a sample line, often with an associated pump,
while the peripheral (guard) ring is also associated
with a dedicated pump. Focused sampling usually
results in faster cleanup but comes with increased
operational complexity. The flow rate of the
sample and guard lines must be properly adjusted
and synchronized for each case at hand, and the
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter,
contains highlights of paper SPE 210091, “Optimizing
Focused Reservoir Fluid Sampling Using a Deterministic
Causation Artificial Intelligence Intuition Technology,” by
Rabindra Chakraborty, Senslytics; Chengli Dong, Shell;
and Hani Elshahawi, SPE, NoviDigiTech, et al. The paper
has not been peer reviewed.
interpretation of downhole measurements on
both sides is significantly more complex than for
conventional sampling operations.
The success of fluid-sampling operations is
highly dependent on human interpretations of the
real-time downhole sensor data. Focused sampling
is carried out by manipulating the differential
rates of sample and guard pumps to stimulate
and accelerate sample cleanup. Various types of
flow regimes observed during focused sampling
operations may be classified as follows:
• Idle: During such regimes, both sample and
guard pumps are turned off. Thus, no cleanup
takes place, and fluids in the tool’s sample lines
that are detected by the downhole analyzers
remain stagnant.
• Commingled: During commingling, either the
sample pump or the guard pump is running,
but flow occurs through both the sample and
guard areas combined.
• Split flow: In such periods, both sample and
guard pumps run simultaneously but at
different flow rates, with fluids moving at
different speeds through the sample (central)
and guard (outer) areas.
The physics of fluid flow in near-wellbore
porous media are highly complex and challenging
to compute analytically and difficult to numerically
simulate at a relevant scale, especially in the
For a limited time, the complete
paper is free to SPE members
at jpt.spe.org.
jpt.spe.org 61
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Reservoir Surveillance
Core Data
10%
System
Surroundings
50%
20%
10%
5% 5%
Ring-Data Elements
Fig. 1—Core- and ring-data processing.
context of real-time operations. The authors
have developed what they term “intuition
technology,” an artificial-intelligence paradigm
that uses scientific learning as its fabric and
mimics the human decision-making process by
iterating hypotheses and weighing situational
changes surrounding dynamics simultaneously
while keeping an eye on possible asymptomatic
behavior. The process involves harnessing experts’
subtle knowledge of fluid properties and change
behavior as hypotheses and iterating them with
the situational and time-series data to generate
a scientific fabric that governs the cleanup. A
contamination-forewarning application built on
this intuition framework was able to interpret the
fluid-cleanup state successfully in all examples
examined as part of this pilot.
Intuition-Technology Framework
The intuition-technology framework processes
intelligence not only from the parameters that
describe the system (core data) but also from
its monitoring of changes in situations and
surroundings (ring data) and can compute
time‑distant cause/effect correlations (Fig. 1).
This makes it an excellent fit for the problem
of fluid-cleanup assessment during focused
sampling operations.
Time-distant cause/effect correlation plays a
critical role in nonmechanical systems because,
in these systems, a cause does not often show
62 JPT | September 2023
an effect instantly yet plays a major role in
triggering a future state change. Operational
knowledge of such systems often exists in the
form of experiential learnings and heuristic
rules in the heads of experts. The intuition-
technology framework captures such knowledge
as hypotheses and progressively refines them
using hypotheses scoring and iteration while
vetting observations of patterns and trends.
Hypotheses iteration plays a key role in finding
lead indicators that indicate state change and its
complex correlation with the ring data under a
given situation. Ring data are the set of influencers
that are changing constantly and affect the state of
the output instantly or in a time-delayed manner.
In the specific application of the intuition-
technology framework to focused fluid sampling,
the sample and guard pump rate act as the
stimulus for cleanup and are labeled as ring data,
whereas fluid properties are labeled as core data,
which are the tangible views of the intended
output—the state of contamination of the sample
fluid. Henceforth in this synopsis, this process will
be referred to as the forewarning application.
Each core data represent one view of the
fluid cleanup. The intuition-based forewarning
algorithm dynamically evaluates and chooses the
best set of views that represents the changes in
contamination and converges the interpretations
from each fluid-cleanup view to cleanup inferences.
Formation-tester data typically are ingested
in the form of time series, which include fluid
properties, guard and sample pump rates, and
pressure and temperature sensor data. Fluid-
property data may include the following:
• Optical density: The most commonly used
optical fluid analyzer output is the optical
density. Optical density represents the
absorbance spectrum and can be indicative of
the color of the fluid as well as the molecular
fluid composition in the line.
• Sound speed: The speed of sound in the fluid
also can indicate the real-time contamination
level in the fluid. Sound speed mainly is used
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Reservoir Surveillance
as a secondary indicator of contamination or
for vetting an inference.
• Density: Physical density of the fluid changes
as the fluid cleans up; this change can be
indicative of the contamination-state change
of the fluid and is easy to interpret because
it corresponds directly to a physical property
measurable both with pressure-gradient
analysis and in the laboratory.
• Capacitance: The patterns in capacitance
behavior can indicate the fluid-cleanup state
but is only useful when sampling oils in water-
based-mud systems or water in oil-based-mud
systems and tends to saturate or short-circuit
at high water fractions.
• Gas/oil ratio (GOR): GOR is a variable used
for determining the cleanup state of the fluid
in the line. GOR has, in theory, the largest
dynamic range possible, ranging from 0 (for
a dead fluid such as oil-based-mud filtrate) to
infinity for a pure dry gas, and, thus, it is highly
sensitive.
A typical contamination-forewarning
application to a given sampling station would
include the following analyses:
• Idle-section analysis: Idle sections where
both pumps are idle are ignored, and thus no
analyses are performed.
• Commingling analysis: During a commingling
operation, the forewarning algorithm derives
the direction of cleanup and the core variable
noise levels and pump-noise levels for either or
both the sample and guard lines.
• Split-flow analysis: The forewarning algorithm
first determines if focused sampling is
functioning and then confirms the cleaning
action within a few minutes after split flow
begins. The goal of split-flow analysis is to
determine early on if the fluid is cleaning.
Once the cleaning action is established, the
algorithm then determines if the sample can
be considered sufficiently clean or not based
on the following two independent methods:
°  Pump-event analysis: Field engineers change
the pump rates to see the effect of the rate
changes on the fluid-property change. Proper
and expected changes confirm that the fluid
in the sample or guard line is cleaning, while
improper changes indicate the operation is
not taking place as intended. If no changes
in fluid properties are observed consistently
at the pump-rate change, then the fluid has
reached its acceptable clean state.
°  Trend analysis: In general, the pump-rate
influence on the fluid properties reduces as
cleanup progresses. When the sample- and
guard-line fluids have both cleaned up to
irreducible levels, fluid properties will hardly
change with the pump rate because the fluid
is homogeneous. Trend analysis computes
for this hypothesis and, once the trend
change drops below noise level, the intuition
algorithm infers the fluid to be clean.
Eleven data files with various degrees of
cleanup complexity have been processed using the
contamination-forewarning application that was
built using the intuition-technology framework.
The complete paper details two examples of those
operational evaluations.
Conclusions
The authors describe an advanced causation-
based artificial-intelligence framework designed to
forewarn complex, hard-to-detect state changes
in chemical, biological, and geological systems.
They have adapted this framework to the problem
of contamination monitoring in focused fluid-
sampling operations.
The pilot application described in the complete
paper harnesses expert knowledge of fluid
properties and change behavior as hypotheses and
iterates them with situational and time-series data
to generate a scientific fabric that governs cleanup.
This application has the potential to save millions
of dollars a year through optimizing sampling times
and value-assurance risk mitigation. JPT
jpt.spe.org 63
 TECHNOLOGY FOCUS

Field Development
Reza Garmeh, SPE, Reservoir Engineering Adviser, Callon Petroleum

T
he integration of machine learning and
physics-based simulation modeling offers
“By combining the predictive
a comprehensive approach to optimizing capabilities of machine-
unconventional development and learning models with the
addressing parent-/child-well depletion issues. By
combining the predictive capabilities of machine-
insights gained from physics-
learning models with the insights gained from based modeling, operators
physics-based modeling, operators can develop can develop customized
customized solutions tailored to the specific solutions tailored to the
characteristics of the reservoir. Machine‑learning
models can optimize well‑spacing, -placement, and
specific characteristics of
-completion designs, while physics-based simulation the reservoir.”
modeling provides a deeper understanding of
reservoir behavior and performance.
Machine learning has emerged as a powerful predict production performance and make
tool, leveraging large volumes of data to provide informed decisions to enhance production
data-driven insights and predictive capabilities. and cost-efficiency.
By training machine-learning models on geologic, Parent/child interactions, where production
completion, and spacing data, operators can from a parent well negatively affects subsequent

REZA GARMEH, SPE, is a reservoir engineering adviser working for

Callon Petroleum. His areas of expertise include reservoir modeling
and simulation studies for both conventional and unconventional
resources, hydraulic fracture modeling, field development planning,
data analytics, and well-performance-optimization strategies. Garmeh
is also experienced in designing and modeling enhanced oil recovery
projects, phase behavior, and rate transient analysis. Throughout
his career, he has worked on various integrated reservoir studies
and field development plan projects. Garmeh holds a PhD degree in
Reza Garmeh petroleum engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and is
Reservoir Engineering Adviser a member of the JPT Editorial Review Board.
Callon Petroleum

64 JPT | September 2023


child wells, pose challenges in unconventional
development. Benchmarking, through the
comparison and analysis of performance data,
plays a crucial role in understanding and mitigating
these issues. By benchmarking production data,
completion designs, and reservoir properties,
operators can identify best practices and develop
strategies to minimize the interference between
parent and child wells.
By harnessing the power of data-driven
insights and the knowledge gained from physics-
based simulation modeling, operators can make
informed decisions regarding well spacing,
completion designs, and operational strategies.
This integrated approach enhances decision-
making, reduces uncertainties, and increases
overall efficiency in unconventional development
projects. As technology continues to advance,
the use of machine learning and physics-based
simulation modeling will further improve the
optimization of unconventional development,
driving the industry toward greater efficiency
and sustainability.
The selected papers and suggested additional
reading provide valuable insights into the
evolving field of development optimization
using physics-based simulation models and
machine learning. JPT
TECHNOLOGY FOCUS
Recommended additional reading at OnePetro:
www.onepetro.org.
SPE 205651
Digital Field Development Planning:
A Collaboration Between Technology and
Process To Enable Fast and Efficient Field
Development Planning
by Mohd Aminuddin Bin Md Karim, Petronas
SPE 207899
Artificial Intelligence for Infill Well Placement
and Design Optimization in Multilayered/
Stacked Reservoirs Under Subsurface
Uncertainty
by Shi Su, SLB, et al.
SPE 208529
A Comprehensive Machine-Learning
Approach for Quantitatively Analyzing
Development Performance and Optimization
for a Heterogeneous Carbonate Reservoir in
the Middle East
by Ruijie Huang, Research Institute of Petroleum
Exploration and Development, et al.
jpt.spe.org 65
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Field Development
Machine Learning, Numerical Simulation
Integrated To Estimate Child-Well Depletion
In the complete paper, the authors analyzed a
robust, well-distributed parent/child well data set
of the Delaware Basin Wolfcamp formation using
a combination of available empirical data and
numerical simulation outputs, which was used
to develop a predictive machine-learning model
(consisting of a multiple linear regression model
and a simple neural network). This model has been
implemented successfully in field developments
to optimize child-well placement and has enabled
improvements in performance predictions and net
present value.
Introduction
Pervasive parent/child well pairs have complicated
the development of the Delaware Basin Wolfcamp
formation by introducing the need to forecast
child-well performance reliably. This problem is
made more difficult by the complex nature of
the physical processes involved in parent/child
well interactions and the variety of geometrical
configurations that can be realized. In broad terms,
the following three classifications of child wells can
be recognized based on their spatial relationship
to the associated parent well and other offset
wells (Fig. 1):
• Type 1—Child wells completed in between two
parent wells
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter,
contains highlights of paper URTeC 3719366, “Integration
of Machine Learning and Numerical Simulation To Estimate
Child-Well Depletion,” by Edward Wolfram, SPE, James
Cassanelli, and Soodabeh Esmaili, SPE, Occidental
Petroleum, et al. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
66 JPT | September 2023
• Type 2—Child wells completed adjacent to a
parent well along with concurrently completed
or codeveloped infill wells
• Type 3—Child wells completed adjacent to a
single parent well
To narrow the range of complexities in the
study, the authors focused on Type 2 child wells
because this configuration will be used most often
in future development activities and because it had
the most existing field examples.
The principal objective of this assessment was
to generate accurate quantitative predictions of the
diminished production performance of child wells
because of pre-existing parent wells.
In this work, a novel, hybrid approach is
detailed involving a combination of machine-
learning techniques and numerical simulations.
This hybrid approach is an attempt to overcome
the individual limitations of machine-learning
techniques, which need abundant empirical data,
and numerical simulations, which are too costly
to simulate the full range of conditions of interest.
By combining these two methodologies, the
final model can leverage the individual strengths
of machine-learning techniques (extracting
information from the available empirical data)
and numerical simulations (providing rigorous,
theory-based physical modeling). To facilitate
the approach, the authors constructed a robust,
For a limited time, the complete
paper is free to SPE members
at jpt.spe.org.

Parent Child Parent
Type 1
Fig. 1—Classification of child-well types in relation to parent wells. Type 1: Child well completed in between two
parent wells. Type 2: Child well completed adjacent to a parent well along with concurrently completed infill wells.
Type 3: Child well completed adjacent to a single parent well.
well‑distributed parent/child well data set using
both available empirical data and numerical
simulation outputs, which were used to develop
a predictive machine-learning model. Much of
the complete paper is dedicated to the critical
data‑collection and -cleaning process, including
parent/child well identification and data-set
construction, response variable definition, and
selection of features and predictor variables.
These topics are not included in this synopsis.
Model Construction
Initial Approaches. Various models were
constructed using actual empirical data only,
numerical simulation data only, and combinations
of these individual data sets. A blind test data set
was separated before modeling the actual data in
the focus area. Models composed with actual data
only performed well on the blind test set. Models
developed using the numerical simulation data
alone were able to predict withheld simulation
data accurately but performed poorly on the
actual data examples in the blind test because of
a lack of landing combinations and more-specific
completions information. Various model types
were considered to handle the complexities and
nonlinear relationships in the parent/child system.
A hybrid model combining both data sets was next
considered, which considerably improved overall
blind test set prediction performance. The final
model of this work was developed in a similar
TECHNICAL PAPERS | Field Development
Parent Child Infill Parent Child
Type 2 Type 3
fashion using this combination of data and has
since delivered predictions within the model error
bounds on newly completed child wells.
Final Model Configuration. Multiple linear
regression (MLR), random forest, and neural
network (NN) models were all reviewed to model
these data. To improve overall model performance,
and combat high model bias and variance, the
authors chose to implement an ensemble model
configuration. The final model was constructed by
averaging the predictions of individually trained
MLR and NN models.
Model Validation
Model Accuracy Metrics. The final model training
coefficient of determination (R2) was 0.88 with a
root mean square error (RMSE) of 6 percentage
points. Simulation data only had an R2 of 0.94,
and actual data training only an R2 of 0.77. After
subsequent use and implementation of the
model, 30 additional sections were analyzed and
validated for model performance after the initial
model construction, adding to the blind test set.
The performance of the final model on all blind
test pairs (including those obtained since model
development) showed an R2 of 0.65 and an RMSE
of 6 percentage points. Future work will involve
updating the model to include these new data pairs
and additional data sources that were unavailable
when the model was initially built.
jpt.spe.org 67
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Field Development
Model Interrogation and Sensitivity Analysis.
With regard to final model feature importance,
spacing and cumulative parent gas production
were most impactful, followed by geologic landing
and completion design.
Model outcomes can show the influence
of factors beyond those attributable to parent
depletion, such as those caused by relative
landing performance that are not entirely
attributable to parent depletion but to relative
landing performance. A reduction in sensitivity
to completion parameters was also seen with
the combination of actual and simulation data.
This is likely because of a reduced granularity
of completion design and compounding error
from scaling a given stimulated reservoir volume
(SRV) shape to different proppant completions.
As expected, the final model demonstrated
the expected trends: Higher-quality landings
experienced less child degradation, closer
proximity increased degradation, larger
completions increased degradation, and more
parent production increased degradation.
Model Implementation Optimization
As with any model, it is important to ensure that
the end users are using features as intended. Initial
inputs using inconsistent feature bases can cause
wider model predictions. With the correct infill
estimated ultimate recovery (EUR) baseline for the
child well, horizontal spacing calculated with the
appropriate number of vertical offsets, and the
right landing based on the SRV interaction chosen,
the model predictions become much truer to
realized depletion degradations.
When considering parent/child optimization,
understanding the spacing, completion design, and
landing of the child, as well as the performance
implications of the associated parents, is crucial.
The model developed in this work can be applied to
help understand the directionality of parent/child
depletion upon the infill development.
From a practical application standpoint,
in collaboration with offset analog review and
68 JPT | September 2023
engineering judgement, model prediction
of Type 2 child wells thus may be applied to
scenarios closer to Type 1, in which multiple
parents are involved in the depletion of the child
infill well (as an approximation in the absence
of more-targeted analyses to evaluate Type 1
child‑well conditions).
Similarly, with respect to landing positioning,
the modeling work indicates higher depletion
from child wells in the same landing as the
parent and in landings known to have lower
performance expectations. In this example,
Bench B has a depletion estimation of
16% compared with a depletion of 19% for
Bench C. This is likely because of the presence
of the parent in the same landing. This trend
has been previously identified and understood
through other means and has been responsible
for the preferential staggered landing placement
of the parent and child wells in a wine-rack
fashion. Completion-design considerations are
also important. In this example, the sensitivity for
the completion design is less for the combined
actual data and simulation case than for the
actuals only because of data-set characteristics
previously described. The directional trends of
the model predictions, however, show increasing
child completions in relation to parent spacing,
cumulative production, and location. This gain
in production is modest, however, and should
be considered in light of frac hits and risk
to the parent and child system. Most model
recommendations have resulted in smaller child
completions than the remaining infill wells.
The complete paper details case studies
in which the model was applied to a range
of scenarios.
Conclusions
Following the final machine-learning analysis, the
authors made the following observations:
• Manually identified parent/child data points
yield improved data quality over automatically
selected ones.
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Field Development
• Wells of different system types (Fig. 1)
demonstrate a different response pattern and
were not able to be modeled together without
greatly reducing model performance.
• The relative EUR of the child infill well to
that of the nearest similar nonchild infill well
demonstrated the best results.
• Simulation data can be used to augment a
limited empirical data set leading to a more-
robust, well-distributed data set and therefore
improved predictive models.
• Ensemble models may be a useful tool for
petroleum-based systems.
• Identifying and incorporating predictor
variables that constrain the physics of the
petroleum system of interest aid in producing
representative and physically consistent
models.
• Care must be taken to ensure that end
users use a consistent feature and response
definition basis to generate accurate model
predictions.
• Model predictions potentially can be used
in conjunction with other independent
estimates of child-well depletion and
engineering judgement to evaluate
parent/child configurations not explicitly
represented in the training data set
(e.g., Type 1 child wells, as in Fig. 1).
• Model results suggest that parent/child well
pairs completed within the same landing
generate increased child-well depletion.
• Additional data and simulation runs will be
needed to extend the scope and application
of the model to different landings and parent/
child configurations. JPT
jpt.spe.org 69
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Field Development
Machine Learning Helps Customize Spacing
for Maximum Acreage Value
In the complete paper, machine-learning (ML)
models were trained using geologic, completion,
and spacing parameters to predict production
across the primary developed formations in the
Midland Basin. The approach of using ML to test
several different combinations of spacing and
completion designs can be repeated across a basin
to find an economical, customized solution for
each development unit.
Introduction
In contrast to conventional methods, ML offers a
data-driven approach that can leverage the large
amount of data generated by operators within
unconventional plays. Several characteristics of
ML models make them well-suited for spacing
optimization, including the following:
• ML models rely on statistical methods to
establish relationships between the input
variables and the output variables.
• ML handles nonlinear relationships well.
• Complex variable interactions can be difficult
to understand with traditional methods.
The downside is the time required to assemble
the input data used for training an ML model.
However, once a model is built that has an
acceptable level of error along with data examples
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter,
contains highlights of paper URTeC 3723023, “Using Machine
Learning To Customize Development Unit Spacing for
Maximum Acreage Value,” by M. Maguire, SPE, Diamondback
Energy; A. Cui, Novi Labs; and T.E. Witham, Diamondback
Energy, et al. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
70 JPT | September 2023
covering the range of cases to be evaluated, many
alternative development scenarios can be quickly
evaluated. In addition, with the right variables
(features) included, a model could be applicable
to an area much larger than that of pilot wells.
ML Methods
Each ML model used production data (monthly
or daily format), directional survey data (to locate
the wells and allow for spacing calculations), a
header table with a variety of information on all the
wells (i.e., completion information, formation, and
completed lateral length), and grid data (typically
geology data, such as effective porosity).
For all models, private data, such as daily
production data and detailed completion data,
had precedence over data acquired from public
sources or a third-party data provider. For a well
to be included in the ML model, it generally had to
have all data values populated; wells with missing
data were excluded. Once the data were gathered,
the derivative variables were calculated, along with
several spacing parameters.
For ML studies of unconventional developments,
practitioners face two main subsurface questions:
how to subdivide the formations to represent the
drainage heights and which rock properties to
pass to the model. Drainage heights defined by
the operator are based on the geochemical typing
data. These heights generally extended further than
For a limited time, the complete
paper is free to SPE members
at jpt.spe.org.
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Field Development
traditionally defined formations (Fig. 1). Because
these drainage boundaries are defined by the true
vertical depth (TVD) positions of specific formational
tops, the total vertical extent of these drainage
heights mirrors the geospatial variation in the TVD
positions of their boundary tops.
To generate the grids, geologic attributes were
calculated from well logs. Log processing began
after drainage heights were determined across
the Midland Basin. Attributes with high correlation
were selectively removed from the model inputs.
Because of the complexity of the multizone
developments in the Midland Basin, multiple
variables were required to analyze production
trends. For each well, a routine algorithmically
identified all neighbors within a certain radius at
1 year of production. Neighbors were classified as
lateral (side-by-side), staggered, or stacked. For
each well, parent/child relationships to the various
neighbors were calculated.
For the target variables (what the model was
predicting), the models used a 36-point time series
vector of production data stretching for the first 3
years of each well’s life. Daily production data was
rolled up into 30-day increments.
The next step involved training a series of
decision-tree-based ML models. Models were
built on different sets of training data based on
concentration around the operator’s development
areas. For each development area, 80% of pads
were used for model training and 20% were
randomly withheld as the test set.
To evaluate model accuracy, percent error and
absolute percent error metrics were used primarily.
Percent error was calculated as the difference in
model forecast vs. the actual production divided
by actual production. Absolute percent error was
calculated by taking the absolute value of the
percent error. These calculations were performed
for every well with actual data for every month
during the first 36 months. A median percent error
(MPE) and median absolute percent error (MAPE) are
calculated for all values within the first 36 months.
Across the time series, the MAPE is approximately
Before After
Fig. 1—Drainage height definitions before and after
geochemical typing data.
18% (meaning the median forecast was within 18%
of actuals), and MPE approximately 3% [meaning a
slight tendency (bias) to overforecast production],
on the test set. These numbers compare favorably
with traditional forecasting methods and sit at the
lower end of the range for ML models in multizone
oil plays such as the Midland Basin.
The most important features for this model
include gas/oil ratio (a proxy for maturity), structural
depth (a proxy for reservoir pressure), spacing
distance to a staggered neighbor, formation,
completions-fluid intensity, and whether a parent
well on the development was located in the same
formation as the child well.
Results: Midland Basin Evaluation
The study included in this synopsis is a Midland
Basin evaluation. For this, a baseline development
on a grid around the area of interest was
forecasted. The baseline development contained
stacked wells across the Lower Spraberry,
Wolfcamp A, and Wolfcamp B landing zones. All
wells were spaced evenly at 10 wells per section
equivalent spacing (528 ft). A consistent lateral
length and completions design was used for each
pad. For this evaluation, all existing wells in the
basin were ignored for spacing calculations and
depletion effects.
While the interior wells had a controlled
528-ft interwell spacing for this configuration,
jpt.spe.org 71
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Field Development
the positioning of each pad relative to others
was possibly inconsistent; thus, all exterior wells
were ignored in the analysis. The forecast results
aligned well with the industry understanding of
the Midland Basin: more oil production for wells
on the west side for the Lower Spraberry and
less oil production in the southeast region for the
Wolfcamp A. Additionally, Wolfcamp B wells have
the lowest estimated ultimate recovery (EUR) of the
formations studied.
Next, another set of forecasts for the same pad
locations was created, but the well configuration
was changed to eight wells per section spacing
(660 ft). Only the well counts and interwell
spacing changed for this second forecast set;
all other parameters were held constant. When
comparing this second forecast with the first, the
results showed that all wells would either have an
increase in oil EUR or remain relatively constant.
In other words, no pads lost production because
of widening interwell spacing. It is apparent that
Wolfcamp B has the largest well-performance
sensitivity to well spacing, while increasing well
spacing yields the smallest change in oil EUR for
Wolfcamp A wells.
From this analysis, it is clear that no “one size
fits all” spacing solution exists for all zones. In this
analysis, effects from parent wells were ignored.
In the complete paper’s other case studies, from a
Glasscock County play and a Martin County play,
optimization work flows are used that incorporate
pre-existing wells.
Discussion
Parent/child well relationships, staggering vs.
stacking, and in-zone spacing were all studied using
ML models. The regional spacing analysis showed
more spacing sensitivity for Wolfcamp B, the
deepest zone, compared with spacing for the other
zones. The western part of the study area, which is
deeper, showed greater sensitivity than the eastern
part for all three zones. The deeper zones and
deeper areas may have greater responsiveness
to the hydraulic fracturing treatment because of
72 JPT | September 2023
pressure, or there may be some other variable
contributing to this trend.
The Glasscock County development study,
focusing on placement optimization for a Lower
Spraberry well offset to existing depletion, used a
model with the largest predicted effect observed
in parent/child relationships in this area and in the
Lower Spraberry. This same model predicted little
to no effect for the offset wells in the Wolfcamp A
and Wolfcamp B.
The Martin County development study, which
examined four possible configurations for a unit
development, showed a forecasted loss of EUR of
only 26% of an average well while dropping two
wells (and their associated capital) relative to the
base-case 32-well development. Highest per-
well recovery was realized by staggering Lower
Spraberry, Wolfcamp A, and Wolfcamp B wells.
In this study, consistent drainage heights
were used while generating geologic features for
each zone around the basin, but results suggest
that model accuracy may be improved by varying
drainage height geographically. In the current
iteration of the model, the drainage heights
are bound exclusively by the explicit tops and
bottoms of specific formations. But the reality of
geochemically informed drainage heights is much
more nuanced than these assumptions. Drainage
boundaries of geologic tops were chosen because
of an abundance of grid data, but, given more time,
even higher model accuracy likely will be achieved
by choosing more-specific drainage heights that
are not limited by only the top and bottom of
geologic formations.
In addition to further refinement of drainage
heights, the models may gain further improvements
through the inclusion of geomechanical properties
and thermal maturity data.
The model is constantly retrained as additional
production is made available, including new well
results. One strong advantage of this approach
is the ability to quickly retrain models based on
additional test data, giving operators the ability
to respond quickly in the planning process. JPT
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Field Development
Study of Permian Basin Provides Insight
Into Parent-/Child-Well Interactions
The complete paper summarizes results from
a collaborative industry study involving seven
operators and 10 pad-scale data sets across four
different shale plays. The paper specifically focuses
on a subset of the data sets from the Midland
and Delaware Basins. The project had three main
objectives: compare and contrast observations
between data sets and basins, develop general
insights into parent- and child-well interactions,
and provide customized economic optimization
recommendations for each individual operator
and data set. The simulations reveal that economic
performance can be optimized with customized
selection of well spacing, job size, and landing
depth based on each company’s objectives and
price deck.
Methods
Modeling Approach. The simulations were
performed with a fully integrated hydraulic
fracturing, wellbore, geomechanics, and reservoir
simulator. The entire life cycle of the wells is
captured in a single continuous simulation. The
fractures are meshed as true cracks, with apertures
on the order of microns to millimeters. Constitutive
relations are used to capture transitions from
being mechanically open to mechanically closed
and vice versa. The simulations are fully 3D, and
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter,
contains highlights of paper SPE 211899, “Results From a
Collaborative Parent/Child Industry Study: Permian Basin,”
by Mark McClure, SPE, ResFrac; Magdalene Albrecht,
SM Energy; and Carl Bernet, Ovintiv, et al. The paper has
not been peer reviewed.
the equations are solved with a fully coupled
scheme. For efficiency, the simulations include only
one or a few stages along the wells.
Fracture geometry is assumed to be planar,
with no more than one dominant hydraulic
fracture strand propagating per cluster. The
modeling approach is based on the industry’s
emerging recognition that hydraulic fractures in
shale are planar at large scale, while being rough
and complex at small scale. In the simulator,
constitutive relations are used to account for the
effect of small-scale complexity on processes
such as proppant transport, fluid leakoff, and
fracture propagation.
Modeling Work Flow. For each data set, the
modeling process consisted of the following steps:
1. Gather and organize data.
2. Create an initial model based on this data.
3. Create a list of key observations from the
data set that constitute the objectives for the
history-matching process.
4. Present the initial model and the list of key
observations to stakeholders to obtain feedback
and check communication.
5. Vary simulation input parameters to
match the key observations while frequently
communicating with stakeholders.
6. After finalizing the history match, perform
a set of sensitivity analysis simulations, varying
For a limited time, the complete
paper is free to SPE members
at jpt.spe.org.
jpt.spe.org 73
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Field Development
parameters such as well spacing and parent-
well age.
7. Set up an economics model and perform
a quantitative optimization of net present value
(NPV)/section or discounted return on investment
[DROI; defined as time-discounted revenue minus
time-discounted operating expense divided by
time-discounted capital expenditure (CAPEX)].
The steps of this work flow are detailed in the
complete paper.
Overview of the Data Sets. The paper reviews two
Midland Basin data sets (MB1 and MB2) and one
Delaware Basin data set (DB). The stratigraphy in
the Delaware Basin has similarity with the Midland
Basin but with some significant differences.
Both basins include prospective benches in the
Wolfcamp. In the Midland Basin, the overlying
formation is generally called the Spraberry, and,
in the Delaware Basin, the overlying formation is
generally called the Bone Springs.
MB1 has five parent wells and nine child wells
drilled around 2 years later. MB2 has vertically
offset parent/child wells, with the overlying
child wells drilled 2.5 years after the underlying
parent wells.
DB has three generations of wells—a
“grandparent” well, an “uncle” Pad A drilled 1 year
later, and a “child” Pad B drilled with wider spacing
6–8 months after Pad A. Pad B is not laterally offset
to Pad A; however, the direction of maximum
horizontal stress is approximately 35° from the
orientation of the wells, so significant heel-to-toe
overlap exists.
Across the basins, variability in layer thickness
and productivity is noted. Therefore, the
stratigraphic columns and formation properties
used in the models for this study do not necessarily
translate to other areas. The landing depths
and parent/child scenarios used in the study
are specific to these particular data sets and
are not necessarily representative of the typical
landing depths or well configurations used by
the operators.
74 JPT | September 2023
For computational efficiency, the authors
simulated sections of the laterals rather than ran
full-well simulations. After the history matching
was completed, new baseline models were
built for the sensitivity analyses and economic-
optimization simulations.
Results and Discussion
Key Observations and Model Calibration. As
part of the history-matching process, detailed
lists of key observations were constructed for
each data set and models were constructed to be
consistent with each of these key observations.
For brevity, the complete list of key observations
and the detailed matches could not be provided
in the complete paper. Observations from fiber,
tracer, and a vertical pressure observation well
suggest that the fractures are large, both laterally
and vertically.
In both the Midland Basin and Delaware Basin,
the stress profile is generally increasing with
depth, encouraging upward propagation. The DB
fractures grow significantly into the Bone Springs.
In this area of the play, the upper parts of the Bone
Springs are considered less prospective because of
higher water cut. Thus, the upward growth can lead
to economically less-efficient placement of water
and proppant.
Two of the three history matches found it
beneficial to decrease the fracture conductivity
during propagation (i.e., increase viscous pressure
drop) relative to the standard cubic law. This
adjustment affects propagation but does not affect
fracture conductivity during production.
Microseismic observations from MB1 and
DB data sets—which have laterally offset child
wells—suggest only mild-to-moderate asymmetry
of fracture propagation. This is probably because
fracture propagation in both basins involves so
much upward growth. Rather than being channeled
laterally within a confined interval, the fractures
grow outward and upward.
Consistent with the observations, the
simulations predict that fracture propagation
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Field Development
should be able to occur both toward and away
from parent wells. However, poroelastic stress
reduction from depletion manifests not only as
asymmetric propagation, but also as asymmetric
fluid placement.
Typically, microseismicity should be correlated
with fluid leakoff. However, previous stimulation
and pressure depletion usually tend to create an
aseismic region around depleted producers. On
the other hand, under special conditions, depletion
can bring the rock closer to failure, encouraging
microseismicity in the depleted region.
In the MB1 data set, child wells modestly
underperform relative to expectation for a nonchild
well. Parent-well production is affected by the infill
wells in the long term, but in the short term, their
production bounces back after the frac hits.
The MB2 data set has a vertical parent/child
interaction. The vertical offset results in a more-
significant effect on production compared with
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lateral parent/child connectivity. The deepest child
wells (closest to the parent wells) significantly
underperform relative to expectation for a typical
well at that landing depth.
Protected by the deeper child wells, the
shallower child wells can propagate significantly
within zone and upward into overlying layers.
As a result, they are much less affected by the
parent-well interference and are significantly
better producers.
The DB data set illustrates lateral parent/
child relationships but with a more-complex
geometry of offset pads. The child wells moderately
underperform compared with the parent wells;
cumulative performance among the children is
well-correlated with level of overlap in fracture
corridors with the unique pad geometries.
When considering a typical parent/child
production response of MB1 and MB2, after a
production curtailment, the parent well resumes
jpt.spe.org 75
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Field Development
its depletion trend, with a moderate reduction
in production relative to the original trend. The
child wells moderately underperform the parent
well. These responses are typical of the Permian
Basin. These experiences contrast with other
shales where frac hits cause major production loss
because of chemical or physical effects.
The parent wells exhibit elevated water cut
following frac hits, with gradual decline over
time. These observations were reproduced in the
simulations as part of the history match.
Economic Optimization. The economic
optimization for each data set was performed
with a detailed economics deck provided by the
operator. The economics decks varied between the
data sets. For the MB1, MB2, and DB data sets, the
operators used similar oil-price assumptions.
The operators also chose to vary different
parameters as a part of the automated
optimization. All varied well spacing and job size.
Some companies chose to optimize for NPV/
section, while others used a blended objective
with both NPV/section and DROI.
Each optimization was begun with a generic
baseline simulation. The well configurations were
idealized relative to the data sets used for history
matching. All three optimizations were performed
with laterally offset parent/child wells, unlike the
MB2 data set that was used for history matching,
which featured vertical offset.
The results show a tradeoff between DROI
and NPV/section. In all data sets, well spacing is a
dominant driver of performance for NPV/section
and DROI. Generally, wider well spacing increases
DROI, so, within the range of optimal values, wider
spacing encourages higher DROI.
In the MB1 data set, the algorithm found
a range of optimal values for cluster spacing
when varying rate and total volume to maintain
constant rate and cluster. Landing depth was not
a major driver in most intervals, but the algorithm
suggested it may be an important driver in one of
the pay zones.
76 JPT | September 2023
When considering NPV/section and DROI vs.
well spacing for the MB2 model, DROI is maximized
at a wider spacing than NPV/section. For the MB2
calculations, the operator chose to include the cost
of land. As a result, a maximum exists on the plot
of DROI vs. spacing.
With a higher price of oil, the incremental
value of increasing production per section is more
likely to outweigh the additional CAPEX of drilling
more wells.
The MB2 optimizations assessed varying job
size in the child wells closest or furthest from the
parents. The optimization moderately favored
larger job size in the wells further from the parent.
Conclusions
The most important difference between Midland
Basin and Delaware Basin plays is that, in many
Delaware Basin wells, significant height growth
occurs upward into layers that are less-prospective.
This reduces the efficiency of proppant and fluid
placement. Conversely, Midland Basin wells usually
underly additional prospective layers, so height
growth is positive or neutral for production. These
differences affect the optimal frac sequencing, well
landing depth, and other factors.
Generally, results favored placing more fluid
and proppant volume in child wells further from
the parent wells. Frac-order sequencing favors
fracturing laterally away from parent wells and
toward unbounded outer wells. Vertically, bottom-
up fracturing is favored in the Midland Basin, but, in
the Delaware Basin data set, top-down is favored.
Overall, parent/child effects must be managed
as part of holistic optimization of the pad and of
the overall development. Rather than providing a
single, optimal design, it is best to provide several
alternative designs with different values of DROI
and NPV/section.
The results of this study show that the optimal
design is strongly influenced by the price of
oil. This suggests that companies should adapt
their designs over time in response to changing
market conditions. JPT
 TECHNOLOGY FOCUS

Offshore Facilities
Graham Collier, SPE, Consultant

T
oday, if one looks out at the vast offshore
oil fields of the Gulf of Mexico, Venezuela,
Brazil, the North Sea, West Africa, and the
Arabian Gulf, it is hard to imagine that, at
some point, all that mass oil and gas production
for our energy and transport needs will come
to an end.
So, what will take its place? We have dabbled
with nuclear power, but that is potentially more
harmful than a carbon-based energy source
and, in most quarters, definitely less popular.
Hydroelectric power stations were once the darling
of the alternative energy brigade of the mid-20th
century, but flooding fertile valleys, displacing
whole populations, and adversely affecting fauna
and flora has cost that option its environmentally
friendly status. Besides, demands on fresh water
in many parts of the world have added another
dimension to the issue. As we moved into the 21st
“On our route to Green Utopia,
there are still some significant
hurdles to overcome.”
century, the landscape began to fill with wind farms
and fields full of solar panels; significant gains in
green energy were being made. But did that satisfy
everyone? No, of course not. The Not In My Back
Yard culture took effect, and protests against solar
farms and wind turbines on land and near shore
became as vociferous as those of the anti-nuclear
and anti-oil groups.
Does this mean that we have run out of
alternatives? No, not yet, because there is still an
abundant energy source all around us that does
not necessarily need carbon in the equation.

GRAHAM COLLIER, SPE, is a consultant in the oil, gas, and energy

industry. He has more than 35 years of experience. Collier holds
a BS degree in naval architecture and marine engineering from
Cardiff University. He began his career with Texaco Overseas
Tankships in London, later joining Halliburton Brown and Root
in London as a project engineer. Collier has held various global
and regional positions through technical, project, corporate, and
commercial disciplines within the offshore and onshore oil, gas,
and energy industry.
Graham Collier
Consultant

jpt.spe.org 77
 TECHNOLOGY FOCUS
Green hydrogen (i.e., hydrogen produced through
electrolysis using electricity generated from the
likes of wind turbines and solar panels) is growing
rapidly in popularity as a successor to hydrocarbon
fuel. Hydrogen can be used in a fuel cell or burned
in a turbine or internal combustion engine with the
resulting exhaust being water vapor. Energy can be
stored in the form of liquid hydrogen or piped from
the source to the place of use. It is worth noting
that hydrogen does have some issues, which, to be
fair, have yet to be overcome. Hydrogen does have
to be chilled significantly to be stored in liquid form
and does have a tendency to permeate carbon
steel. It is highly likely that, in the future, we will see
a derivative of hydrogen in the form of ammonia
that will become more prominent. Ammonia also
can be used in a fuel cell to generate electricity
and also can be used in a turbine or combustion
engine. Ammonia has very similar physical
properties to propane and is significantly easier
to store and transport than hydrogen.
On our route to Green Utopia, there are still
some significant hurdles to overcome. Installing
new offshore wind farms and laying new electricity
cables to shore is expensive. There still must be
improvement in green hydrogen storage and
transport technology, and, if we are to branch
down the ammonia path, there definitely has to
be significant improvement in green ammonia
production rates.
Coming back to offshore oil and gas, much of
the massive infrastructure of offshore platforms
and pipelines is nearing the end of its production
life. The original plan for the myriad of platforms
and pipelines is to decommission, remove, and
scrap. This original plan is flawed. Removal of
platforms has the most negative environmental
78 JPT | September 2023
Recommended additional reading at OnePetro:
www.onepetro.org.
OTC 30993
The Use of Offshore Wind To Reduce
Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Offshore
Hydrocarbon Production—A Case Study
by David McLaurin, Intecsea, et al.
SPE 205446
Feasibility of Repurposing Offshore
Decommissioned Gas Rigs Into Fish Farms
by Saptarshi Pal, University of Strathclyde, et al.
SPE 205439
Initiatives in UK Offshore Decommissioning
Following the Wood Review: Applicability
for Decommissioning in Norway
by Rune Vikane, University of Stavanger, et al.
impact. The successful Rigs to Reefs plan in the
US Gulf of Mexico offers a viable alternative, but
full repurposing of platforms and pipelines is
probably the best solution—a solution that could
have a positive effect on the fledgling offshore
wind-to-hydrogen (ammonia) industry. If we are to
achieve the goals of significant carbon reduction
this century, then a holistic approach to the
environment must be considered.
I hope that you enjoy this month’s selection
of technical papers. JPT
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Offshore Facilities
Study Compares Fixed Wind Architectures
for Offshore Green Hydrogen Production
The complete paper is a summary of a study that
covers through-life economics for producing green
hydrogen from offshore fixed wind turbines. The
options compare production of hydrogen on the
turbine itself (decentralized) with production on a
dedicated production platform (centralized) and
production from an onshore facility. The results
of the economic analysis show that decentralized
hydrogen production can be competitive against
onshore production at longer offshore distances.
Introduction
The paper contains a summary of an offshore
green-hydrogen-production study performed by
a group of companies. The field architectures for
each of the evaluated cases are described and the
results of the economic analysis are presented in
the complete text.
Field Architecture Layouts
The hydrogen production cases in the study are
divided into three architectural layouts.
Case 1: Onshore Hydrogen Production. The
electricity produced at the offshore wind farm
is gathered by interarray cables and directed to
an offshore substation. From this location, the
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter,
contains highlights of paper OTC 32317, “Fixed Wind
Architecture Comparison for Offshore Green Hydrogen
Production,” by Dominic Pliszka, Catherine Gourlay, and
Nihad Abdullazada, Subsea7, et al. The paper has not
been peer reviewed. Copyright 2023 Offshore Technology
Conference. Reproduced by permission.
combined power is transported to an onshore
hydrogen production facility through offshore export
cables. Case 1 (the base case) is used to benchmark
and compare the results against Cases 2 and 3.
Case 2: Offshore Hydrogen Production
(Decentralized). The electricity generated by each
offshore wind turbine is directed to a hydrogen
production unit specific to each of the turbines,
and green hydrogen is produced. Hydrogen is
collected and exported through a dedicated
hydrogen transport line to onshore facilities.
Case 2 also is referred to as a wind farm with a
decentralized hydrogen production system. In this
scenario, a gas compressor located on each wind
turbine is considered.
Case 3: Offshore Hydrogen Production
(Centralized). The electricity produced at the
offshore wind farm is directed to a hydrogen-
production facility at a centralized offshore
substation. The hydrogen from the substation
is exported through a dedicated hydrogen
transportation line to onshore facilities. This
scenario is also referred to as a wind farm with
centralized hydrogen production system.
Wind-Farm Overview
A single wind turbine with a maximum power output
of 15 MW is assumed as the basis of this study.
The complete paper
is available for purchase
at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org.
jpt.spe.org 79
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Offshore Facilities
The wind farm has 67 turbines on fixed monopile
foundations, giving a power rating of 1 GW. The wind
turbines will be connected in a daisy-chain manner,
each chain containing eight or nine turbines.
Wind Profile and Hydrogen Production Rate
Calculations. Wind Data. This subsection of the
paper contains an example of electricity production
from a 1-GW wind farm with a load factor of 50%.
When the electricity production from the wind
farm over a 1-year period on an hourly basis was
considered, the following observations were made:
• Highest electricity production: approximately
983,000 kW
• Lowest electricity production: approximately
50 kW
• Total electricity production: approximately
38 TWh/yr
• Average electricity production: approximately
500,000 kW
Table 2 of the complete paper shows the
hydrogen production rates for each of the three
architectures evaluated in the study.
Hydrogen-Export Pipeline Sizing. In Cases 2 and
3 for offshore green hydrogen production, the
hydrogen is transported from the wind farm to the
onshore receiving facility by a pipeline. This section
contains a deliverability assessment to determine
the appropriate pipe size based on the onshore-
facility pressure value and the export distance.
In this study, the electrolyzer produces
hydrogen at 30 barg; the onshore receiving-facility
requirement is that pressure is varied from 49 to
249 barg to investigate the performance of the
system at various operating conditions. Because the
hydrogen is produced at a lower pressure than the
onshore facility pressure, a requirement will exist for
a compressor to boost the pressure of hydrogen.
Results. In this section of the paper, a hydraulic
deliverability assessment is performed with the
following key parameters:
80 JPT | September 2023
• The hydrogen flowrate is 14.8 tonnes/hr.
• Onshore facility pressure is fixed at 49 barg.
• The export distance varies from 20 to 200 km.
• Pipeline sizes of 6–14 in. outer diameter (OD)
are considered.
The optimal size of the hydrogen transportation
pipeline carrying a fixed flow rate of 14.8 tonnes/hr
of green hydrogen is between 6 and 14 in. OD.
Results show that the frictional pressure losses in
the pipeline are very small.
In this study, hydrogen is produced at 30 barg
from the electrolyzer. It then will be compressed
to ensure that flow-assurance requirements are
met for the onshore receiving facility. Onshore
compression could be used if the larger-diameter
pipe was selected.
For the infield lines, a 4-in. inner diameter size
was selected. For the export line, a 10-in. nominal-
bore pipeline is selected for all distances studied.
Economic Assessment
Capital Expenditure (CAPEX). CAPEX estimates
have been generated for the three offshore winds
to hydrogen field architectures that include various
distances from shore (20, 50, 100, and 200 km). The
key CAPEX components for these projects are as
follows:
• Wind-turbine infrastructure
• Hydrogen electrolyzer
• Submarine cables
• Pipelines, risers, and manifolds
• Onshore facilities
The graph in Fig. 1 summarizes distances from
shore for the three field architectures.
Operating Expenses (OPEX). The authors
consider a summary of the Year 2030 case
100 km from shore for OPEX and abandonment
expenditure (ABEX).
OPEX and ABEX Pricing Notes.
• Hydrogen-stack replacement is assumed to
take place every 8 years.
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Offshore Facilities
• Infrastructure operations and maintenance
includes all operations, maintenance, and
services costs for the offshore wind farm and
hydrogen production.
• 10% has been added onto the turbine-
decommissioning cost in Case 2 to account for
extra time for hydrogen decommissioning.
• Platform decommissioning has been assumed
to be 10% of CAPEX.
• Subsea umbilical, riser, and flowline
decommissioning has been assumed
to be 10% of CAPEX.
For the purposes of the study, OPEX for
centralized and decentralized cases were assumed
to be the same.
Investment Rate of Return (IRR). In the authors’
IRR comparison, the commodity price is fixed
at $4/kg.
Observations.
• Better performance of the decentralized case
compared with the onshore case at longer
distances is because of electrical losses and the
large CAPEX of the transmission cables for the
onshore case.
• The poor performance of the centralized case
for all distances to shore is the result of the
large CAPEX of the centralized platforms.
• In all cases, performance decreases with
distance offshore.
Sensitivity to Commodity Price. A study
was performed on the effect of the hydrogen
commodity price on project economics. The analysis
was performed using the 50-km offshore case, with
hydrogen prices varying from $3 to $7/kg. For both
onshore and decentralized cases, positive IRR is
reached at approximately $4/kg.
Observations.
• Unless subsidized, these projects are poor
performers unless hydrogen prices reach
$6–7/kg. However, these results could change
significantly with small changes in efficiencies.
5,000
Onshore Decentralized Centralized
4,500
CAPEX M$
4,000
3,500
20 km 50 km 100 km 200 km
Fig. 1—CAPEX vs. distance from shore for all cases,
including ABEX.
• The difference between onshore and
decentralized is minimal at 50 km but deviates
substantially after that distance.
Conclusions
The three architectures will coexist, but each
project must be studied in detail before an
architecture strategy is selected.
• With regard to onshore production, when
transitioning from 100 to 200 km from shore,
transmission is converted from alternating
current (AC) to direct current (DC). The cost
of AC to DC conversion equipment becomes
significant.
• The study concluded that, with decentralized
production, it is possible to size the
turbine foundation platform to integrate a
containerized hydrogen-production system
without a major effect on installability,
foundations, or turbine design.
• For the centralized platform, a twin-platform
layout is likely because of the large weights
of electrical process equipment. It is unlikely
that this can be achieved in a single lift. In the
event that the platform is manned, a safety
recommendation would be to separate the
hydrogen-production plant from the rest of the
platform functions.
• Further from shore, the AC export cables
become less viable.
• Compression has a significant effect on
economics. JPT
jpt.spe.org 81
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Offshore Facilities
Qualification Approach Detailed
for Offshore Hydrogen Pipeline Systems
The qualification of a pipeline system for
hydrogen transport, important in the transition
to a decarbonized energy system even if strictly
related to offshore pipelines, is a broad field
that requires a systematic approach from basic
material knowledge to complex physical models
and fracture and fatigue assessments. The
authors’ analysis of qualification requirements,
including available test types and testing
protocols, led to a matrix of potential tests,
detailed in the complete paper, to be conducted
in hydrogen and air environments for the steel
base material, seam weld, and girth weld of
offshore pipelines.
Offshore Pipeline Materials
Requirements vs. Hydrogen
Transportation
The authors’ work outlines many challenges,
including the following:
• Although hydrogen pipelines installed and
operating onshore are common, at the
time of writing, none exist in the offshore
environment.
• The blending percentage of hydrogen into
natural gas in the future-transport scenario
is still under discussion.
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter,
contains highlights of paper OTC 32158, “Offshore Hydrogen
Pipeline System Qualification: Design and Materials/Welds
Testing in Hydrogen Environment,” by Angelo Santicchia,
Elvira Aloigi, and Salvatore Terracina, Saipem, et al. The
paper has not been peer reviewed. Copyright 2023 Offshore
Technology Conference. Reproduced by permission.
82 JPT | September 2023
• Small amounts of hydrogen can have a
substantial effect on fatigue and fracture on
high-strength materials.
• The effect of hydrogen on pipe-material fatigue
and fracture properties correlates directly to
the specificity of the offshore environment,
which will be very demanding in terms of
longitudinal stress and fatigue.
Another important aspect to consider is the
effect of hydrogen on weldments both longitudinal
and circumferential that are part of pipe-material
fabrication and pipeline fabrication.
A dedicated engineering team analyzed key
standards and the available literature in terms
of theoretical studies and experimental tests of
materials in hydrogen environments. This activity
indicated that, in addition to theoretical and
design considerations, characterization of primary
material and welding properties in hydrogen
environments that will affect the failure modes
of offshore pipeline design is a critical step.
Testing Protocols and Equipment
Slow Strain Rate Test (SSRT). Smooth cylindrical
specimens were tested in inert gas (nitrogen), pure
hydrogen, and a hydrogen/natural gas mixture
for comparative purposes. This testing was aimed
at evaluating the susceptibility of the pipeline
materials (base material and weld metals) to
The complete paper
is available for purchase
at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org.
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Offshore Facilities
hydrogen embrittlement when subjected to typical
conditions envisaged for future hydrogen service.
Tensile cylindrical specimens were tested
at room temperature (24°C) in a high-pressure
gaseous atmosphere. Tests were carried out in
displacement control mode. In the initial part
of the tensile test, in the plastic regime, after
attainment of material yielding but before reaching
the maximum tensile strength of the specimen,
the strain distribution along the specimen was
approximately uniform.
Rising Load Fracture Toughness. Fracture
toughness tests were conducted through the
single-specimen testing method by rising-load
application on coiled tubing (CT) specimens by the
testing machine showed in Fig. 1. A CT sample
configuration was adopted. Tests were conducted
at room temperature in the following environments:
air, a pure hydrogen gas environment, and a
hydrogen/natural gas blend. In the complete paper,
only tests in air and pure hydrogen are reported.
To calibrate linear variable displacement
transducer (LVDT) readings, an additional sample
was loaded in air on the same machine for
hydrogen testing, allowing the same configuration
used in official hydrogen testing, with the exception
of the autoclave being open and a clip gauge on
the mouth of the sample. This test was aimed
at facilitating the calibration of LVDT readings to
deduce the crack mouth opening displacement.
Presoaking Effect on Charpy V-Notch (CVN)
Impact Tests. To evaluate the potential permeation
of gaseous hydrogen on samples, a CVN impact test
campaign was conducted on samples exposed to
high-pressure gaseous hydrogen before the test to
compare with corresponding tests on nonexposed
specimens. The tests were carried out at both –20°C
and +0°C.
Presoaking Effect on Tensile Tests. To investigate
the effect on tensile properties of samples exposed
to gaseous hydrogen in stressed conditions for
Fig. 1—Rising-load fracture toughness testing machine.
different soaking times, a tensile testing campaign
was planned. Tensile cylindrical specimens were
exposed at room temperature (24°C) in a high-
pressure gaseous hydrogen atmosphere and to
high levels of stress (equal to 90% of actual yield
stress) before the tensile test.
The tensile-testing machine with the autoclave
used in this test is the same used for the SSRT.
Samples Cutting and Specimens Testing
All specimens for the tests were machined
from pipe joints of longitudinal welded pipes
(38-in. outside diameter) containing the girth
weld. The pipes were marked by a univocal
identification code.
All samples were extracted as close as possible
to the inner surface of the pipe. Samples with
notches in the pipe material were extracted in
transverse-longitudinal (T-L) orientation with
respect to pipe axis. Samples with notches in
the heat-affected zone crossing the fusion line
and in the weld metal center line were extracted
in normal-parallel orientation with respect to
the welding direction. This corresponds to T-L
orientation for the seam weld and L-T orientation
for girth welds.
Preliminary Results
SSRT. For the longitudinal base material, tests
in nitrogen and in the gas blend showed similar
behavior in terms of tensile curves. Nevertheless,
jpt.spe.org 83
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Offshore Facilities
the hydrogen contained in the gas blend showed
an influence on the reduction of area (ROA) of the
tensile specimens.
Stress/strain curves did not allow highlighting
of the effect of hydrogen on material ductility. On
the other hand, the ROA at rupture clearly showed
the effects of hydrogen in terms of loss of ductility.
In particular, samples tested in pure hydrogen
presented an ROA 60% lower than that in the inert
environment, while samples tested in the gas blend
showed an intermediate behavior between inert and
pure hydrogen samples, with an ROA approximately
30% lower than that in the inert environment.
Tests in the base material in the transversal
orientation in nitrogen and the gas blend showed
similar trends of tensile curves up to rupture. Tests
in the pure hydrogen environment showed curves
similar to those in nitrogen and the gas blend up
to the material maximum strength point. After
this point, the curves in hydrogen showed a rapid
decrease of loading capacity, evidence of the effect
of hydrogen.
Tensile curves for the tests in the seam-
weld material in the nitrogen and hydrogen
environments showed a very good repeatability of
the results in terms of shape of the curves, yield
strength, and maximum strength of the material.
Tensile curves for the tests in the girth-weld
material in the nitrogen and hydrogen environments
showed a very good repeatability of the curves in
terms of shape of the curves. Elongation at rupture
was visibly affected by hydrogen embrittlement,
with an important reduction of elongation at
rupture in the case of pure hydrogen tests and an
intermediate result for the gas-blend test.
Presoaking Effect on CVN Tests. The most
important outcome of this testing was the lack of
evidence of any effect of presoaking for the test
at the two test temperatures, –20°C and 0°C. Any
difference encountered between presoaked and
nonpresoaked samples was well within the scatter of
results produced by the three test repetitions. Also,
any small difference in results did not necessarily
84 JPT | September 2023
show a lower impact energy of presoaked samples.
This further confirms the absence of hydrogen
embrittlement on the presoaked samples. Such
an outcome corroborates the hypothesis that, in
the absence of applied stress during exposure to
hydrogen, no significant hydrogen is absorbed into
the material to exert any embrittling effect.
Presoaking Effect on Tensile Tests. The authors
investigated the average ROA obtained for the
tensile tests after hydrogen presoaking in loaded
conditions after three distinct periods of presoaking.
This testing was aimed at investigating the hydrogen-
soaking behavior of the material in the presence of
a tensile stress applied during hydrogen exposure.
After 3 days of presoaking in stressed
conditions, a small loss of ductility was noted; a very
small loss of ROA compared with nonpresoaked
tests was observed. Tests with 7 days of presoaking
showed a far more significant reduction in ductility.
This testing showed that static presoaking of
samples is feasible but a significant stress must
be applied when the sample has already been
exposed to hydrogen.
Findings: Offshore Hydrogen Pipeline
System Qualification vs. Offshore
Hydrogen Pipeline Design
An intensive test campaign performed by the
authors with support from Rina CSM Laboratories
helped reach the following conclusions:
• No major effect of hydrogen on yield and
tensile strength was recorded.
• An effect on ductility was observed.
• Testing of the girth weld produced by the
authors’ company provided preliminary
information of good toughness performance
in a hydrogen environment.
• The failure modes affected by the tested
mechanical properties were not subject to
major modifications.
• High grades up to X65/X70, with additional
requirements as necessary, appear suitable
for hydrogen transport. JPT
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Offshore Facilities
Potential Revealed for Hydrogen
Production From Offshore Wind in Uruguay
With almost the entire electricity matrix
having been decarbonized, the next step in
the Uruguayan energy transition includes the
development of a hydrogen economy. In the
complete paper, the authors present the results
of the assessment of two regions suitable for
bottom-fixed offshore wind energy (OWE)
technologies. Results are encouraging and
could lead to new possibilities in supporting
the development of a hydrogen economy.
Introduction
For Uruguay, hydrogen is expected to
play an important role in tackling the
various challenges of the second phase of
decarbonization; it holds the potential for use
in the transport sector and in raw materials
and chemical products.
Having no oil production, Uruguay is a net
oil importer; therefore, the extensive use of
hydrogen in the domestic market may have a
profound effect on the national economy and
energy sovereignty. Preliminary findings show
that Uruguay may have hydrogen production
costs between $1.2 and $1.4/kg, placing the
country among the world’s net exporters.
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter,
contains highlights of paper OTC 31879, “Assessment of
the Potential for Hydrogen Production From Bottom‑Fixed
Offshore Wind in Uruguay,” by Juan Tomasini,
SPE, Pablo Gristo, SPE, and Santiago Ferro, SPE,
ANCAP, et al. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
Copyright 2022 Offshore Technology Conference.
Reproduced by permission.
Green Hydrogen Production From
Offshore Renewable Energy
Compared with onshore wind, OWE presents
several advantages, including a greater capacity
of each turbine (fewer turbines required for the
same wind-farm capacity) and the availability of
larger areas (allowing larger wind-farm capacity).
Even if bottom-fixed is the predominant technology
for OWE projects, floating technology is attracting
increasing investment and public policy support
because of its potential to access wind resources
at water deeper than 40 m, where bottom-fixed
may be less feasible technically, economically,
or logistically.
Green Hydrogen Production. Contrasting with
blue or gray hydrogen (produced from fossil
fuels with or without carbon capture and storage,
respectively), green hydrogen provides the lowest
near-zero-emissions option. Green hydrogen
can be produced through the gasification of
biomass or the electrolysis of water powered
by renewable electricity.
Alkaline electrolysis and proton-exchange-
membrane (PEM) technologies are widely available
commercially. Alkaline electrolysis is a fully mature
technology that represents the lower-cost option,
but its operational load limits are not as broad as
those for PEM; therefore, its coupling with variable
renewable sources should be carefully managed.
The complete paper
is available for purchase
at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org.
jpt.spe.org 85
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Offshore Facilities
Region 1
2,009 km2
Region 2
15,560 km2
Fig. 1—Regions selected for bottom-fixed offshore
wind technology.
On the other hand, PEM electrolysis is not yet a
fully mature technology, with higher costs that are
expected to be reduced in the coming years.
The production of hydrogen from OWE is
gaining attention as a promising way to transport
large amounts of renewable energy produced far
offshore. Depending on distance and available
power, transporting hydrogen through pipelines
is cheaper than the use of electricity. Additionally,
several other advantages exist for using pipelines
instead of cables, including faster rollout, improved
reliability, access to storage, and environmental
impact. Nevertheless, offshore hydrogen production
will not be limited to the use of pipelines.
With regard to offshore production of green
hydrogen, different concepts are being explored,
including “islanded” centralized production on
a dedicated platform and a distributed solution
wherein each wind turbine hosts its own
electrolysis module. Additionally, for deeper
waters, the centralized concept could even be a
floating vessel analogous to a conventional floating
production, storage, and offloading vessel that
could be customized for floating wind applications.
Conditioning and Conversion for Transport. For
bulk transport, hydrogen must be compressed,
liquified, or converted to other products (carriers).
The primary carriers being considered are
86 JPT | September 2023
ammonia, methanol, and liquid organic hydrogen
carriers (LOHC) such as methylcyclohexane or
dibenzyl toluene.
Given the high energy requirements for the
liquefaction process and the low volumetric energy
density of the compressed hydrogen, and the lack of
economically available sources of CO2, ammonia or
LOHC probably will become the preferred options
for transporting large quantities of hydrogen on the
global market. The use of LOHC has the advantage of
making use of existing infrastructure. However, the
global transport of ammonia is already mature, with
a well-established supply chain.
Offshore Wind in Uruguay. The offshore
environment of Uruguay has excellent wind conditions
in terms of both mean wind speed (exceeding 8.7 m/s
at 100-m hub height) and capacity factors. Recent
works, considering environmental, anthropic, and
jurisdictional aspects, estimated an offshore wind
potential of 291 GW (mean value) from which
144 GW corresponds to bottom-fixed technologies.
The Uruguayan government is preparing an
international tendering for production of hydrogen
and carriers from offshore wind. In the framework
of the offshore hydrogen bidding round, following
a model based on an adaptation of the oil and
gas bidding process, energy companies will be
invited to carry out feasibility studies and potential
installation of infrastructure for the production of
hydrogen from offshore renewable energy at their
own cost and risk.
Distinct regions (zones) were delineated as the
most suitable for the development of both bottom-
fixed and floating wind technologies. In addition
to considering favorable conditions for existing
wind technologies, criteria for regional delineation
aimed to minimize environmental and anthropic
interference and took into consideration industrial
and artisanal fishing, coastal protected areas, and
safe navigation channels. As presented in Fig. 1,
Region 1 is in the interior waters of the Uruguayan
territorial at distances greater than 10 km from
the coast in water depths ranging from 10 to 30 m.
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Offshore Facilities
Region 2 is on the Uruguayan Exclusive Economic
Zone at distances greater than 60 km from the coast
in water depths ranging from 20 to 60 m. Within
these regions, several sites (contract areas) will be
defined and made available to offers during the
tendering process. In the complete paper, by using
a stochastic approach, the authors quantify the
hydrogen potential of these two regions suitable
for bottom-fixed offshore-wind technologies.
The complete paper includes a description and
application of calculation processes.
In addition to the power and hydrogen-
production-capacity calculations, both regions
were qualitatively evaluated regarding other
aspects related to specific development concepts.
Considered aspects include social acceptance,
operating expenses (OPEX), capital expenditure
(CAPEX), and logistics and infrastructure challenges.
A site in Region 1 approximately 13 km from
the shore was considered to be developed with
hydrogen and carrier production onshore, with
export vessels loading carrier in a deepwater port.
A site in Region 2 approximately 100 km from the
shore was considered a standalone project with no
physical connections with the shore. In that case,
both hydrogen and carrier would be produced
directly at an offshore platform for the loading of
export vessels.
Data and Results
Simulation results for rated power capacity and
hydrogen-production potential for each region
are presented in Table 4 of the complete paper.
Calculated rated power capacity potential for
both regions is 82.6 times higher than the current
installed onshore-wind capacity in the country.
The ratio between mean values of hydrogen-
production potential for both regions and current
equivalent diesel consumed for heavy-duty
transport in Uruguay is 83:9.
CAPEX is expected to be higher for Region 2
development because it is in deeper waters and
all process equipment will be located offshore.
The Region 1 development concept considers
production facilities onshore; therefore, CAPEX
is expected to be lower. Moreover, OPEX is also
considered to be higher for Region 2 developments
because it represents more equipment offshore at
a greater distance from shore.
Logistical and infrastructure challenges
are expected to be higher for the Region 1
development concept because green hydrogen
and carrier will be produced onshore; thus, export
vessels would need to be loaded in a deepwater
port. The requirement of a new deepwater port
on the east coast will likely raise social-acceptance
concerns. Additionally, the proximity to the coast
of a wind farm located in Region 1 may also affect
social acceptance for this development because
wind turbines likely will be visible from the coast.
Region 1 is in the Uruguayan territorial sea,
while Region 2 is in the Exclusive Economic Zone.
That could be perceived as an advantage for
Region 1, because Region 2 is within the Argentine/
Uruguayan Common Fishing Zone and would
involve communication at a diplomatic level to
install marine infrastructure.
Conclusions
The combined hydrogen production potential of
the regions considered in this study reaches a
mean value of approximately 11.2 million tons of
hydrogen per year. The calculated power capacity
of both regions represents greater than 80 times
the current installed onshore wind capacity in the
country, and their calculated hydrogen-production
potential is greater than 80 times the equivalent
diesel currently consumed in Uruguay for heavy-
duty transport, demonstrating the relative size of
the local market compared with the huge potential
of offshore development. Other development
options may include standalone all-offshore
concepts for Region 1 (for vessels loading offshore
without a deepwater port) or cable connections to
shore for sites in Region 2, as well as the possibility
of connection with the national electric grid that
may benefit the project with additional green
electrons for extended periods. JPT
jpt.spe.org 87
 TECHNOLOGY FOCUS

Oilfield Chemistry
Michael Fuller, SPE, Senior Completions Subject-Matter Expert, Chevron

A
vid readers of recent technical
literature in upstream energy can
identify an upward trend in the
frequency of studies that use large-
data-set analysis to improve decision-making
regarding production and operations. While big
data and artificial intelligence had originally been
fascinating concepts without wide examples of
practical use, recent studies have showcased more
practical uses of these methods of data analytics.
The technical arena of oilfield chemistry, both
that of the natural downhole environment and that
of chemistry introduced downhole, provides a rich
testing ground for advanced uses of data. Whereas
early uses of data in the upstream chemical space
included use of design of experimentation for
vetting or developing new chemistries, today
data analytics enables, for example, production
allocation based on assessment of produced
“The technical arena of oilfield
chemistry … provides a rich
testing ground for advanced
uses of data.”
hydrocarbons. Featured studies showcase this
type of application of data analytics to improve
production assessment. One example reviewed
various geochemical methods to allocate zonal
contribution to production by analyzing produced
fluid composition and decoupling the contributions
of individual zones’ fluids. Another selection
measured the carbon isotope signatures of gas
from individual zones and used it to determine
the thermal maturity of the gases from different

MICHAEL FULLER, SPE, is a senior completions subject-matter expert

in the Chevron Technical Center, where he works in materials, fluids,
and methods for completions, drilling, and stimulation operations
as a part of Chevron’s Wells team. In his 19 years working in global
roles in upstream oil and gas, he has been issued several patents
and produced numerous industry publications. Fuller holds a PhD
degree in chemistry from Northwestern University and a BS degree in
business chemistry from Northern Illinois University. He is a member
of the Chemical Science Roundtable at the National Academy of
Michael Fuller Science, Engineering, and Medicine and was vice-chair for the 2023
Senior Completions SPE International Conference on Oilfield Chemistry.
Subject-Matter Expert
Chevron

88 JPT | September 2023


reservoirs; this work has the potential for similar
zonal allocation assessment of gas production.
In its current maturity, machine learning
also provides significant potential to improve
our understanding and prediction of downhole
chemical reactions. In another featured study, a
geochemical data set of staggering proportions was
populated with water composition data from many
years and wells. Coupled with the equations that
govern many downhole reactions to use machine
learning, the presented tool allowed improved
modeling and prediction of, for example, inorganic
scaling behavior under downhole conditions. JPT
TECHNOLOGY FOCUS
Recommended additional reading at OnePetro:
www.onepetro.org.
SPE 206091
Asphaltenes: Fundamental Principles
to Oilfield Applications
by Oliver Mullins, SLB, et al.
SPE 211238
Detection and Monitoring of Corrosive Oilfield
Microorganisms Through Novel Biomarker
Technologies
by Sven Lahme, ExxonMobil, et al.
SPE 207340
Toward the Rational Design of Chemical
Formulations for EOR From Carbonates:
Molecular-Level Understanding of Carbonate
Wettability and Its Reversal by Surfactants
and Ions
by Shixun Bai, University of Wyoming, et al.
jpt.spe.org 89
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Oilfield Chemistry
Geochemical Approaches Assist
Production Allocation of Commingled Fluids
Geochemical-based methods for production
monitoring and allocation are much lower-cost
than use of production logging tools because no
additional rig time or extra personnel are required
at the well site. Additionally, no intervention to
the production of hydrocarbons from a well is
required, reducing operational risk. The complete
paper summarizes these approaches and provides
examples and describes a best practice that avoids
a one-size-fits-all approach.
Introduction
Production allocation from petroleum
geochemistry is defined here as the quantitative
determination of the amount or portion of a
commingled fluid to be assigned to two or more
individual fluid sources at a particular moment
in time based on fluid chemistry. It requires
knowledge of the original chemical compositions
of each of the fluids before mixing (referred to
here as the “end members”) and the ability to
identify statistically valid differences in their
chemistries. The fluid may be oil, gas, or water.
The concept is illustrated in Fig. 1a by mixing
colors to represent the end members and
commingled fluid.
Production monitoring, in contrast, is the
analysis of a time series of production fluids from
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter,
contains highlights of paper SPE 205130, “The Application of
Petroleum Geochemical Methods to Production Allocation of
Commingled Fluids,” by Richard Patience, Mark Bastow,
and Martin Fowler, Applied Petroleum Technology, et al.
The paper has not been peer reviewed.
90 JPT | September 2023
the same source. This is demonstrated in Fig. 1b,
where a change in chemistry can be observed
between Days 60 and 100. Two data points at
the same time are duplicates, proving that the
change in chemistry is real and not an artifact.
It is generally qualitative to semiquantitative in
comparison with production allocation.
Production allocation, therefore, is inherently
more complex, in terms of both the sample
requirements and data treatment. Allocation
is the main focus of this paper.
Allocation Sampling Strategies
For a production allocation project, the three
following distinct stages require samples:
Stage 1: Can Contributing End Members Be
Distinguished? In the initial stage, a determination
must be made regarding whether end member
reservoirs contributing to production can be
distinguished based on their chemical composition.
End Members From Conventional Plays.
These typically are flowed samples from drillstem
tests, bottomhole samples from wireline tools, or
production tests, usually taken during the drilling
of exploration or appraisal wells.
Several issues must be considered when
assessing the usefulness of such samples:
• Are the end member samples representative
of the reservoir as a whole?
For a limited time, the complete
paper is free to SPE members
at jpt.spe.org.
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Oilfield Chemistry
Red
Parameter Value
Orange Violet
Green
Yellow
Blue
End members Commingled Fluid
(a) Red, yellow, blue Orange, violet, green, gray
Fig. 1—Production allocation vs. monitoring. (a) Production allocation using mixing of colors to represent end
members and commingled fluid. (b) Monitoring using fluid chemistry over production time.
• Is the end member sample contaminated with
organic compounds from drilling fluid?
• When were the end members taken, how were
they stored, and has there been significant
alteration of the composition of the sample
as a result?
End Members From Unconventional Plays.
Rock samples from pilot (vertical) wells drilled
with water-based mud are typically used as end
members in unconventional plays. If only cuttings
are to be collected, then sampling should be
densely spaced to account for as much vertical
heterogeneity in the source rock facies, and thus
petroleum compositions, as possible.
Using rock extracts from pilot wells and
comparing them with produced oils from lateral
wells carries additional problems. One issue is
that the petroleum in a source rock is substantially
fractionated during expulsion. Additionally, the
ability to extrapolate end members from rock
extracts is limited to a certain distance from
the pilot well.
Stage 2: Analysis of Commingled Produced Fluid
Samples for the Attribution of Initial Production
to Contributing Reservoirs. The commingled
produced fluid samples must be analyzed, along
with known laboratory mixtures of end members,
for this purpose.
1.1
1.0
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0 100 200 300 400
Days Since Production Started
(b)
Care must always be taken when sampling,
shipping, and storing samples, especially lighter
fluids such as volatile oils and gas or condensates.
The chemical composition of the commingled
production should lie between the compositions
of the analyzed end members. If not, then
a reassessment of the actual end members
is necessary.
During this stage, it is very useful to make
at least one synthetic mixture of the end members
in known proportions in the laboratory.
Stage 3: Collection and Analysis of Commingled
Fluid Samples at Regular Time Intervals After
Production Start. The purpose of this step is
to check whether changes have occurred in the
contributions of the different reservoirs over time.
The frequency of sampling over time depends
on the anticipated, or unanticipated, variation
in compositions of the produced fluids. No fixed
prescription for this task exists, so frequency is
something that should be agreed with the help of,
and collaboration with, the client.
Analytical Methods and
Data Reproducibility
Analytical Methods. The selection of analyses
to be conducted will depend on the nature of
the fluid concerned and include any methods
that pre-existing data might suggest would be
jpt.spe.org 91
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Oilfield Chemistry
useful. Common analytical methods include
the following:
• Gas chromatography (GC) of the whole oil
(WO‑GC), extract, or individual fractions
(saturates or aromatics fractions)
• GC mass spectrometry (GC-MS) of the
saturates or aromatics fractions for biomarkers
or alkylbenzenes (AKBs)
• MS or GC-MS for stable isotopic composition
of oils, extracts, fractions, or individual
compounds
• GC-MS of gases for molecular and stable
isotopic composition
Each method can produce a large amount
of peak data to work with, from a small number
of peaks (e.g., AKBs or gas analysis) to hundreds
or even thousands of peaks (WO-GC).
Data Reproducibility: Intraday and Interday.
Standard laboratory practice is to include, within
each analytical batch, a standard oil (NSO-1) to
check for intraday reproducibility. This oil is run
every day that samples are analyzed and acts
as a long-term laboratory standard. However,
differences within a set of study samples may be
smaller than the differences between the study
samples and NSO-1.
To identify and potentially correct for batch
effects over time (interday reproducibility), it is
recommended to select one or more common
samples from the set of study samples to rerun
with each batch. Therefore, at a minimum,
one of the end members should be run with
each commingled produced fluid to test for
data variability from the original end member
analyses over time.
Experience of correction for batch
effects indicates that at least one sample
common to all analytical batches, and with
replicate data, is essential and that replicate
analyses would be required to differentiate
variation between batches from random
instrument variation.
92 JPT | September 2023
Data-Interpretation Approaches
Exploratory Data Analysis. Principal components
analysis (PCA) is designed to reduce the number of
variables to a smaller number of new variables (the
principal components) that are linear combinations
of the original variables, extracted so that each
successive component accounts for as much of
the variance within the data as possible.
Pairwise comparisons of samples are often
useful. Comparisons of duplicate analyses should
show very similar peak concentrations that
lie along a diagonal equivalence line, whereas
comparisons of different samples should
ideally show multiple significant differences in
peak concentrations. From such paired sample
comparisons, several measures of distance (or
difference) between samples can be calculated.
Mixture Deconvolution. For production allocation,
the objective is to determine the proportions of end
members that constitute a commingled production
sample. For all analytical methods, such as WO-GC
or GC-MS, two major approaches of using the data
include peak concentrations (or area or height as
a proxy, possibly percent-normalized) and peak
ratios (either adjacent peaks or an optimal subset of
not necessarily adjacent but closely eluting peaks).
Whichever approach is used, the reliability and
reproducibility of the analytical data is probably
more important than specific algorithms.
Mixture deconvolution using peak
concentrations is mathematically the most
straightforward. The composition of a commingled
production sample is modeled as a linear
combination of the compositions of the end
members weighted by the contributions of
each end member to the mixture. Because of
uncertainties associated with analytical data, no
one linear equation will be satisfied exactly; thus,
a least-squares best-fit solution is obtained.
Diagnostic ratios are used widely by geochemists
for interpretation but, for mixture deconvolution,
have the disadvantage that ratios do not mix linearly.
Equations for each ratio must include concentration
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Oilfield Chemistry
coefficients and the relative concentrations of the
ratio denominators in the end members. These can
be estimated from abundances in the end members,
averaged over replicates to smooth any variations if
reliable quantification data are available, but more
typically are obtained by calibration using laboratory
mixtures of the end members.
Replicate Analyses and Error Propagation.
Replicate analyses are run to estimate data
variability for the following purposes:
• Statistical identification of peaks, or ratios
of peaks, that differ significantly between
different samples, as compared with random
analytical variation
• Consideration of any variation between
samples because of analyses at different
times (batch effects) to avoid, if possible,
the necessity (and cost) of reanalysis of all
historical samples each time a new sample
batch is received
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Proposed Work Flow Summary
The authors’ proposed work flow for production
allocation of commingled fluids can be summarized
in the following steps:
1. Selection of end member samples that
contribute to the commingled production fluid
2. Determination of the differences in chemical
composition of the end members through
laboratory analysis of the end members (e.g., by
WO-GC), replication of analyses of samples, and
statistical treatment of the data (e.g., PCA)
3. If statistically significant differences exist,
laboratory analysis of the end members and
commingled fluids with appropriate replicate
analyses of samples
4. Data selection and preprocessing (e.g.,
selection of ratios or concentrations of components)
5. Determination of end member contributions
by solving equations (e.g., least-squares best fit)
and uncertainty estimation (e.g., Monte Carlo or
bootstrap methods) JPT
jpt.spe.org 93
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Oilfield Chemistry
Chemical and Carbon Isotope Composition
Proves Effective as Gas Diagnostic Tool
Chemical and carbon isotopic compositions of
produced gases are useful tools to monitor gas
production and to assess their origin, thermal
maturity, and migration. In the complete paper, the
authors present different geochemical approaches
to assess the origin of gases and thermal maturity
and to evaluate the effect of adsorption on shale
gas during production.
Introduction
Carbon isotope type curves constructed for
compounds from methane through n-pentane
can be used to group gases into distinct families
and correlate them to their source rocks. Large
variations in carbon isotope ratios exist among
the natural gas compounds, which are caused by
isotopic fractionation between the sedimentary
organic matter (kerogen) and each individual
hydrocarbon compound. During the generation of
hydrocarbons from kerogen, cracking of 12C-12C
bonds requires slightly less energy than 13C-12C
bonds. Thus, hydrocarbons will be enriched
in 12C relative to the kerogen. Methane, which
contains only one carbon atom, shows the greatest
fractionation and will have the most negative
δ13C value (most enriched in 12C). Ethane through
pentane show progressively less fractionation (less
negative δ13C values), with the latter usually having
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter,
contains highlights of paper SPE 209992, “Gas Chemical
and Carbon Isotope Composition as a Diagnostic Tool
for Energy,” by Zainab Almubarak, SPE, Mohammad
Alrowaie, and Feng Lu, Saudi Aramco, et al. The paper
has not been peer reviewed.
94 JPT | September 2023
a δ13C value close to that of kerogen (and associated
oil). The magnitude of the fractionation effect will
vary depending on the type of kerogen (i.e., Type I,
II, IIS, or III), the temperature during hydrocarbon
generation, and the adsorption/desorption effect.
Thus, gases generated from different source
rocks often have distinctive carbon isotope type
curves. In shale gas (unconventional reservoirs),
two different types of gases coexist—free gas and
adsorbed gas. Free gas occurs in natural fractures
and matrix pores, whereas adsorbed gas is noted
on the surface of pores. During the early stages of
production, free gas accounts for most produced
gas. The adsorbed gas starts in mid-late stages but
maintains high and stable production.
In this study, the authors use carbon isotopic
compositions of light hydrocarbons (C1–C5) to
assess origin and thermal maturity and to compare
different gases derived from unconventional
reservoirs. Moreover, carbon isotopes are used
to assess migration paths and to monitor gas
production in unconventional shale gas reservoirs.
The gas samples were collected periodically from
the same interval to monitor any isotope variation
and evaluate the effect of gas adsorption.
Methods
Pressurized samples of natural gas were collected
from conventional and unconventional reservoirs
through production tests, drillstem tests, or
For a limited time, the complete
paper is free to SPE members
at jpt.spe.org.
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Oilfield Chemistry
downhole samplers and analyzed for chemical
composition. For the conventional study, a total
δ13C (‰, V-PDB)
of 13 gas samples were collected from different
reservoirs (A, B, C, D, and J): four gas samples from
Reservoir A, two gas samples from Reservoir B,
three gas samples from Reservoir C, three gas
samples from Reservoir D, and one gas sample
from Reservoir J. Gases derived from Reservoirs
A, B, and J are younger and shallower than gases
derived from Reservoirs C and D (older and deeper).
For the unconventional study, seven gas samples
were collected periodically from the same shale
interval (Reservoir W) from the same well (Well Y) on
different dates to monitor any isotope variation.
The collected gases were analyzed using a
gas chromatograph equipped with a combustion
furnace interface coupled to a stable isotope ratio
mass spectrometer. Carbon isotope ratios were
measured for individual hydrocarbon compounds
from methane to pentane and for CO2.
Negative δ13C values indicate enrichment
of 12C relative to the Vienna Pee Dee Belemnite
(V-PDB) standard, whereas positive values indicate
enrichment of 13C. Analytical precision, determined
by replicate analysis of samples, is generally better
than ±0.2.
Results and Discussion
Conventional Study. Origin of Natural Gases.
To assess the origin of all-natural gases, a plot of
methane δ13C vs. gas wetness was used that had
been modified from the literature. All the studied
gases from the different reservoirs (A, B, and C)
had an oil-associated thermogenic origin.
Thermal Maturity and Source Rock. To assess
and compare the thermal maturity of several
gases in different unconventional reservoirs, stable
carbon isotope curves were used. These curves
were constructed for compounds from methane
to n-pentane. The similarity of the stable isotope
profiles in Reservoir A suggested a common
source rock for Reservoir A gases (Fig. 1). This also
occurred for Reservoir B. Gases from Reservoir
A and Reservoir B displayed very similar isotopic
–15
–20
–25
–30
–35
–40 Well F2 Reservoir A
Well E5 Reservoir A
–45
Well E3 Reservoir A
–50 Well E2 Reservoir A
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5
Carbon Isotope Profiles From C1 to C5
Fig. 1—Carbon isotopic composition profile of methane
to pentane hydrocarbons of Reservoir A gases.
profiles, suggesting common source rock, but
Reservoir A gases had higher thermal maturity than
Reservoir B gases. The small variation in the C3+
hydrocarbons observed in Reservoirs A and B could
suggest a mixing of different sources.
The studied gases were collected from two
age groups. Gases from Reservoirs A and J were
younger and shallower than gases from Reservoirs
C and D. In general, all studied gases had similar
isotopic profiles, but the older and deeper gases
collected from Reservoir C and D intervals had
lower thermal maturity compared with the gases
collected from Reservoir A and J intervals. The
overall similarity could indicate a similar source
or a migration of the light gases into the younger
and shallower reservoirs through unsealed
faults or fractures. The similarity between the
gases welcomes further investigation once more
geochemical and geological data become available.
The lower thermal maturity observed in
the older and deeper gases is an unusual trend
and could be a result of one or multiple factors
including the type of organic matter and the sulfur
content in the kerogen or oil. The bulk properties
for condensate from the studied older and deeper
intervals and the gas compositional data indicated
high sulfur content. The presence of sulfur in the
kerogen, oil, or even in the form of elemental
sulfur and hydrogen sulfide (H2S) can enhance
the hydrocarbon generation at an earlier maturity
level. Therefore, the studied older and deeper
jpt.spe.org 95
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Oilfield Chemistry
gases with high sulfur contents could have been
generated at an early thermal maturity level.
Unconventional Study. Monitoring Gas Production.
In shale gas reservoirs, gas transportation during
production may be influenced by several geological
processes that affect the gas content and isotope
composition. These processes control gas release
from shales, and, meanwhile, result in isotope
change. Carbon isotopic composition (δ13C) of the
light hydrocarbons (C1–C5) is used to monitor long-
term gas production in shale gas reservoirs and to
evaluate gas in place.
In this project, seven gas samples were
collected from the same unconventional reservoir
(Reservoir W) from the same well (Well Y) on
different dates between 2019 and 2021. The gas
samples were analyzed for carbon isotope ratios in
each of the light gas compounds, including C1, C2,
C3, iC4, nC4, iC5, and nC5 plus CO2. The isotopes
of the gas compounds from the seven samples
appeared to be quite close and displayed very
small variations. The isotope variations from the
studied gas samples were too small to suggest
any effect from adsorption/desorption. This could
result from multiple factors.
Isotope fractionation during production occurs
in the following four stages:
1. Free gas stage
2. Transition stage
3. Adsorption/desorption stage
4. Diffusion stage
The effect of desorbed gas begins in Stage 1,
when 12CH4 is released because of the low
adsorption energy, which results in lighter gas than
in Stage I. In Stage III, more adsorbed gas is being
released, and the δ13C value will increase with time.
Other factors controlling isotope fractionation
are total organic carbon (TOC) content and
clay mineral content. The extent of isotope
fractionation is positively correlated with TOC and
negatively correlated with clay mineral content.
The studied shale gas consists of three organically
enriched tiers. Tier 1 (the base) has the highest
96 JPT | September 2023
organic content, with an average TOC value of 7.4%
and maximum values reaching 13.2%. Tier 2 has an
average TOC value of 5.9% and a maximum value
of 14.3%. Tier 3 has an average TOC value of 3.2%
and a maximum value of 8.9%. In terms of clay
content, the formation has extremely low content,
with an average of only 5%.
All these data are in favor of isotopic
fractionation (high TOC and low clay content), but
the authors’ results show very small variations. This
could be the result of several factors; for instance,
the production might have still been in Stage I, with
the time intervals too short to observe the effect
of adsorption.
Conclusions
The complete paper demonstrates the usage of
carbon isotopic compositions of light hydrocarbons
(C1–C5) to assess the origin and thermal maturity
of conventional reservoirs. Furthermore, carbon
isotopic compositions of light hydrocarbons
(C1–C5) were used to assess migration and monitor
gas production in unconventional shale gas
reservoirs. The following conclusions were made
based on isotope analysis for the gases collected
from the conventional reservoirs:
• All studied gases from different ages had a
thermogenic origin.
• The older and deeper gases have lower
thermal maturity than younger and shallower
gases, which could result from organic matter
compositions, sulfur content in oil and gas, the
presence of H2S and other sulfur species in
the reservoirs, or potential lateral and vertical
migration.
• The collected gas samples from shale gas
over a 20-month period showed insignificant
isotope variations, which probably was the
result of the production still being in Stage 1
(the free-gas-seepage stage).
Further geochemical analysis is needed to
better understand the thermal maturity variations
and the gas-migration path during production. JPT
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Oilfield Chemistry
Reduced-Order Models Blend
Chemistry, Machine Learning
for Water-Property Analysis
Water affects almost every operation in the
exploration and production industry. Until now,
time-intensive laboratory tests or cumbersome
third-party simulators were required to extract
physicochemical properties. In the complete
paper, a family of machine-learning-based
reduced-order models (ROMs) trained on rigorous
first-principle thermodynamic simulation results
is presented. The developed ROMs that predict
water properties enable automated decision-
making and improve water-management work
flows. The presented approach can be extended
to other oilfield, chemical, and chemical-
engineering applications.
Introduction
The properties of the water phase and all
produced fluids directly influence flow assurance,
three-phase flow pressure/volume/temperature
modeling, and fluid-compatibility aspects across
the full life cycle of the well, including during
well construction, stimulation, and production
operations. Modeling these systems enables one
to predict, mitigate, and, in some cases, completely
prevent deleterious effects in tubing, the reservoir,
and near-wellbore regions.
First-principle thermodynamic simulations are
often considered to be ground truth in the oilfield
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter,
contains highlights of paper SPE 213869, “Water Digital
Avatar—Where Chemistry Is Mixed With Machine Learning,”
by Jesse Farrell, SPE, and Sergey Makarychev-Mikhailov,
SPE, SLB. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
industry and are widely used in place of time-
consuming laboratory experiments.
The use of rigorous thermodynamic software,
however, is not always practical. In certain cases,
commercial and open-source simulators are
overloaded with functionality unnecessary for a
task, require training of personnel, and are often
difficult to incorporate into digital work flows in
the cloud or to deploy at the edge on surface
equipment or the downhole tools available to
model changing conditions in real time. This
is where ROMs find their application because
they are fast, reasonably accurate, and highly
customizable solutions.
The authors’ scientific hypothesis was that
machine-learning-based ROMs can be used to
quantify the physicochemical properties and
scaling tendencies of oilfield waters in place of
rigorous, first-principle thermodynamic models.
Methods
The United States Geological Survey (USGS)
Produced Waters Geochemical Database was
used as the initial data source for this study.
The original database contains approximately
115,000 produced-water and other deep-
formation water samples collected and
characterized in the United States in the past
120 years. Although the USGS database is an
For a limited time, the complete
paper is free to SPE members
at jpt.spe.org.
jpt.spe.org 97
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Oilfield Chemistry
excellent source, the data still required cleaning
and enrichment.
For the first step, inconsistent, poorly
populated, and outlier samples were removed,
which led to noticeable data attrition and resulted
in approximately 85,000 “clean” records.
The enrichment phase included several
manipulations and alterations of the original
data. The resulting data set is not always accurate
regarding individual samples but is much better
populated than the original one in terms of
minor ion concentrations, and is believed to be
representative on a large scale.
Specific gravity (SG) was imputed for records
in which it was missing on the basis of the ion
concentrations (Na+, Ca2+, Cl−) and the reported
total dissolved solids values. The SG values were
necessary to convert all concentrations to units
of mass percent. The random forest algorithm
was applied here, trained on water samples with
available SG data.
Concentrations of the primary ions—K+, Mg2+,
HCO3−, SO42−, and Br−—were then imputed when
missing because these ions are believed to be
always present at certain quantities in produced
waters even if they are not explicitly reported.
Finally, concentrations of minor ions or
species were imputed for missing values, but they
were added to only a subset of the samples. The
minor ion concentration enrichment values were
estimated using the random forest algorithm
trained on existing data.
Still, the enriched USGS data set contained
many samples of similar composition and only
reflected produced waters in the US. Furthermore,
because USGS samples typically were analyzed
at ambient conditions, they might have already
lost some salts because of scale precipitation in
different well-production operations. Therefore,
key scaling ion concentrations were varied
systematically to cover a broad range of realistic
saturation indices (SIs).
A subset of 12,000 representative samples
was obtained using principal component analysis
98 JPT | September 2023
(PCA). The PCA algorithm linearly transforms
the data into a new feature space of so-called
principal components, which are orthogonal to
each other (i.e., not correlated) and retain most
of the variance of the original data set. Thus,
14 concentrations of all solutes were minimum/
maximum normalized to avoid bias toward those
with greater absolute concentrations, and principal
components were calculated. Representative
produced-water compositions were then
retrieved and evenly distributed along each
principal component to capture variance across
all data‑set dimensions.
In the next step, the PCA-sampled compositions
were subjected to systematic variation of primary
scaling ion concentrations in broader ranges
than those reported by the USGS and then to a
variety of temperatures (T) and pressures (p) to
cover a broad range of conditions (50–400°F and
14.7–20,000 psi).
Finally, charge balance was reconciled in all
samples by adjusting the Na+ or Cl− concentrations,
and the water concentration was calculated.
The resulting data set with 17 original features
contained approximately 90,000 unique
compositions with more than 1 million rows at
various T and p values.
The first-principle thermodynamic simulations
were performed with commercial software
using all of these input features. The simulation
output consisted of more than 500 attributes.
With results exporting and post-processing, the
total computational time was approximately
6 weeks. The resulting simulation data set was
approximately 5 GB in size.
Out of more than 1 million simulations, 20%
(180,000), with 2,000 unique USGS compositions,
was set aside to serve as the validation set for
independent model validation and the remaining
80% of the data was used as a training set
(with test sets split out whenever necessary).
Machine-learning modeling was performed
with Python scripts using various commercial
library systems for algorithm screening, final
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Oilfield Chemistry
modeling, and model hyperparameter optimization
(HPO). Model optimization was performed
targeting minimization of the root mean square
error (RMSE) with 10-fold cross-validation.
All ROMs were trained on a virtual machine
with a graphics processing unit, which provided
a significant increase in the training speed for
certain algorithms compared with purely central-
processing-unit-based virtual machines.
Results and Discussion
While some physical properties, such as density
and specific electrical conductivity, can be
predicted with very high accuracy using even
simple methods such as multiple linear regression,
other properties, such as SIs, require more-
sophisticated algorithms. Several target property
predictions were checked. The reported model
prediction metrics—mean absolute error, RMSE,
and coefficient of determination (R2)—were
averaged across 10 folds within the training set.
For the majority of the checked properties,
decision-tree algorithms, particularly those using
ensembles with gradient boosting, were found to
perform the best.
For gradient-boosting decision-tree
algorithms, which have many hyperparameters,
HPO can be a computationally expensive task.
Ensembling multiple (weak) models and stacking
them is an alternative approach that has been
demonstrated to have a similar prediction accuracy
for the same allocated training time as heavy
HPO. The authors used a hybrid approach that
relied on limited HPO followed by ensembling the
resulting models with the bootstrap-aggregation
(bagging) technique.
Model optimization strongly depends on the
model use case. Model prediction accuracy is
not always the primary objective, because other
factors, such as training and inference times,
model size, and ease of deployment, might be
more important.
The HPO models were ensembled using
bagging (with 10 estimators) to reduce
potential overfitting. The total training time
was approximately 2 hours per model, and the
model size was approximately 32 MB. Model
validation was performed on the independent
validation set.
All produced-water physical properties
can be predicted with very high accuracy and
very low errors. However, modeling chemical
properties—pH, SI, and precipitate masses and
volumes—is more challenging. Experimentation
enabled the authors to conclude that physical
properties are good predictors of solution
pH, which, in turn, is a critical parameter for
many mineral-scaling tendencies. Therefore,
predictions were made sequentially, which
significantly improved chemical‑property
prediction accuracy.
Most models successfully explained variability
in the target property values. For pH and most
SIs, RMSE, a better metric of model accuracy than
R2, was generally well below 0.1, indicating that
prediction errors were better than, or at least
close to, experimental measurement errors and
generally exceeded the practical requirements
for scale modeling.
The proposed approach can be combined
with direct measurements at a well site. One can
envision ROMs that can predict water properties
on the basis of direct inputs of spectra and other
sensor data.
To demonstrate the power of the developed
ROMs, a prototype web application, called Water
Digital Avatar, was developed using an open-source
library for Python to enable fast web application
development. Part of the web application interface
is shown in Fig. 1.
Conclusions
A comprehensive data set consisting of more than
1 million thermodynamic simulations of nearly
90,000 water samples at varied temperatures and
pressures was produced. The data set contained
a broad range of physicochemical properties and
mineral scale indices and was used to train a family
jpt.spe.org 99
 TECHNICAL PAPERS | Oilfield Chemistry

Fig. 1—Prototype of the Web application that predicts produced-water properties.

of machine-learning-based ROMs. These ROMs of oilfield waters in place of rigorous, first-principle

enabled fast and accurate predictions of water
properties and can be incorporated into any digital
work flow, proving the hypothesis that machine-
learning-based ROMs can be used to quantify the
physicochemical properties and scaling tendencies
thermodynamic models. This opens opportunities
to extend ROMs to other systems and applications
within and outside of the oil and gas industry,
including corrosion, degassing, and particular
scaling scenarios. JPT

100 JPT | September 2023

 TECHNICAL PAPERS

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for SPE members for 2 months. These August and September papers are available now.
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AUGUST 2023 SEPTEMBER 2023

(available here through 30 September) (available here through 31 October)

FORMATION EVALUATION RESERVOIR SURVEILLANCE

Unlocking Fracture Characterization Ambiguity:
A Multidisciplinary Integrated Approach
A Deep-Learning-Based Approach for Production
Forecasting and Reservoir Evaluation for Shale Gas
Wells With Complex Fracture Networks
Fracture Characterization and Basement Reservoir
Potential of Phra Wihan Formation in Southern Part
of Uttaradit Province, Northern Thailand
Downhole Monitoring Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing:
Fundamentals and Two Decades of Deployment in Oil
and Gas Industries
Advanced Research and Development in Unconventional
Use of Tracer Technology for EOR and IOR: What
Lies Beyond?
Optimizing Focused Reservoir Fluid Sampling Using
a Deterministic Causation Artificial Intelligence
Intuition Technology

SUBSEA SYSTEMS FIELD DEVELOPMENT

Innovative Industry Lead Project for Renewables Integration of Machine Learning and Numerical
for Subsea Power Simulation To Estimate Child-Well Depletion

Using Machine Learning To Customize Development

HEALTH, SAFETY, AND ENVIRONMENT
Hybrid Offshore Power Generation
GAS PRODUCTION
Reviving Production From Over 100 Deep Gas Wells
Suffering From Halite Deposition In Oman Through
Velocity String
Unit Spacing for Maximum Acreage Value
Results From a Collaborative Parent/Child Industry Study:
Permian Basin
OILFIELD CHEMISTRY
The Application of Petroleum Geochemical Methods
to Production Allocation of Commingled Fluids

A Successful Water Shutoff Using a Thixotropic Gas Chemical and Carbon Isotope Composition
Treatment in a Subhydrostatic and Highly Aromatic as a Diagnostic Tool for Energy
Well Results in Increased Gas Production of 30% Water Digital Avatar—Where Chemistry is Mixed
and Reduced Water Production of 63%, Vietnam With Machine Learning

TOPICS COMING UP IN OCTOBER

Offshore Drilling and Completion | Artificial Lift | Data Analytics | Sand Management

jpt.spe.org 101
 SPE NEWS

SPE Technical Sections Recognized

With Annual Awards
The Data Science and Engineering Analytics
Technical Section has been selected to receive
the 2023 Presidential Award for Outstanding
Technical Section.
This award is the highest
honor, recognizing the top 5% of
SPE’s technical sections around
the world. The technical section
should be very proud of the many
exceptional accomplishments achieved over the
past year. Thank you for continuing to fulfill
SPE’s mission and serve your members.
The Presidential Award for Outstanding
Technical Section recipient will be honored
during the President’s Luncheon on
Wednesday, 18 October, during the
2023 SPE Annual Technical Conference and
Exhibition (ATCE) in San Antonio, Texas.
The Geothermal and Hydraulic Fracturing
Technical Sections have been awarded the
Technical Section Excellence Award for 2023.
This prestigious award is the
second-highest honor technical
sections may receive and is awarded
to only 20% of eligible technical
sections around the world. The
award is in recognition of the section’s hard work
and strong programs in technical dissemination,
professional development, member engagement,
community involvement, and operations. Thank
you for continuing to fulfill SPE’s mission and serve
your members.

SPE eMentoring
No boundaries, no borders. eMentoring makes a world of difference.
eMentoring gives SPE members a way to contribute to the E&P industry by sharing industry insights
and practical career advice with young professionals, or by helping university students with academic
and career direction. Young professionals also have the unique
opportunity to serve as mentors to students.
Join the program that is making a difference
in the lives of SPE members.

CHARLES RAPIER “RAP”
DAWSON JR., SPE, passed
away 27 July. He was
81. Dawson began his
37-year career at Esso
Production Research,
now ExxonMobil, in 1967,
where he contributed
to technological advances in
the fields of drilling fluids, torque-and-drag and
pipe‑buckling calculations for directional drilling,
and drilling automation.
An SPE member since 1967, he received the
SPE A Peer Apart award in 2007 in recognition of
his dedication to the peer review of 100 or more
papers. He was also the author and coauthor of
four technical papers.
Dawson served as a Technical Information
Service volunteer (1987–1988) and a member
of several committees, including the Drilling
Committee (1987–1990), the Drilling Conference
Program Committee (1988–1991), and the Drilling
Engineering Award Committee (1997–2000).
He also served as chairperson of the Drilling
Engineering Award Committee (1999–2000) and
as a technical editor for the Editorial Review
Committee of SPE Drilling and Completions
(1995–2012).
Dawson held a BS, a master’s degree,
and a PhD, all in chemical engineering, from
Rice University.
PEOPLE
GARY W. SCHEIN, SPE, passed
away on 3 July. He was
66. Throughout his
43-year career in the
oil and gas industry,
he worked for several
companies, beginning
with Dresser Titan, and later
for BJ Services Company Africa
Ltd., Dale Resources, Pioneer Natural Resources,
Pioneer Corp., and lastly, as a consultant. He
specialized in well completions and stimulations.
An SPE member since 1981, in 2017 he received
the SPE Past Chairperson Award and the SPE
Regional Completions Optimization and Technology
Award. He was a coauthor of two technical papers.
Schein served in several roles with the Dallas
Section from 2013 to 2020, including program
chairperson, co-chairperson, chairperson, and
director. He also served as a Distinguished Lecturer
(2004–2005) and a member of the Well Completions
Technical Section (1988–1991).
He held a BS in chemistry from Northern
Arizona University.
In Memoriam
This section lists with regret SPE members
who recently passed away. If you would like
to report the passing of a f­ amily ­member
who was an SPE member, please write to
service@spe.org.
Pamela K. Lewis, Midland, Texas
Seferino Yesquen, Lima, Peru
jpt.spe.org 103
 SPE EVENTS Visit www.spe.org/events for a complete list.

Events 13–14 September | Rio de Janeiro

Digital Transformation

5–8 September | Aberdeen 19–20 September | Rio de Janeiro

SPE Offshore Europe Well Decommissioning in Brazil

6–7 September | Abu Dhabi 26–27 September | Miri, Malaysia

SPE International Executive Symposium: Maximising Value of Existing Assets through
Accelerating Decarbonization Deployment Innovative Well Integrity, Intervention and
Through Innovation and Collaboration Workover Solutions

12–14 September | Muscat 3–4 October | Georgetown, Guyana

SPE International Hydraulic Fracturing The Guyana / Suriname Basin: Strategic
Technology Conference and Exhibition Development of Resources During
the Energy Transition
18–22 September | Perth

Call for Papers

SPE Asia Pacific Hydrogen Week Symposium

25–27 September | Midland

SPE Permian Basin Energy Conference
SPE Conference at Oman Petroleum
27–28 September | Abu Dhabi & Energy Show
Integrated Digitalisation and AI Technologies— Deadline: 7 September
Maximising Efficiency and Sustainability
Symposium SPE Improved Oil Recovery Conference
Deadline: 11 September
2–5 October | Abu Dhabi
ADIPEC Offshore Technology Conference
Deadline: 12 September
2–6 October | The Woodlands
SPE Gulf Coast Section—Electric Submersible SPE Norway Subsurface Conference
Pumps Symposium Deadline: 18 September

3–4 October | Denver SPE International Health, Safety, Environment

IADC/SPE Managed Pressure Drilling and and Sustainability Conference and Exhibition
Underbalanced Operations Conference Deadline: 6 October
and Exhibition

3–5 October | Wheeling, West Virginia

SPE Eastern Regional Meeting

Workshops Sales
7–9 September | Duliajan, India
Overcoming Drilling Challenges Mike Buckley Danny Foster
Media Accounts Manager Associate Director,
12–13 September | Al Khobar
Tel: +1.713.457.6828 Americas
Petroleum Economics: Value Generation
mbuckley@spe.org Tel: +1.713.457.6312
Through Visionary Economics
dfoster@spe.org

104 JPT | September 2023