______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Equipment
Oil and gas fields often retain bypassed pay, which are areas or layers of the reservoirs with hydrocarbons that were neither recovered nor produced during the earlier stages of field development. Recognizing and maximizing opportunities for bypassed pay is key to maintaining a profitable field and can increase reservoir pay zones significantly- by as much as 50 percent in some cases. Identifying these bypassed pay opportunities is often challenging, especially in brownfields with significant existing surface infrastructures and hundreds of old wells within the subsurface. A combination of improved processes and methodologies supported by advanced tools can unlock significant opportunities to extend field life by several decades. Lessons learned from these methodologies can be applied at the onset of new green fields to maximize the field’ s productive life at a minimum per-barrel cost while maximizing the return on investment( ROI).
Identifying bypassed pay opportunities
There are several challenges and concerns to consider when identifying bypassed pay opportunities. An initial development plan is typically created upon discovering a new oil field. The oil’ s location is already known, but what isn’ t necessarily clear is the cost associated with developing that field, such as the economics of extraction or production cost.
The concept of bypassed pay is fundamentally centered on the idea that oil will likely be left behind as the field is being depleted, although identifying where it is and how to get it often remains challenging. As the field matures and pressure decreases, it will no longer be sufficient to continually produce oil naturally in that field. Over time, as oil production declines, secondary and tertiary recovery efforts commence. The
▲ Figure 1: Simplified well log data highlighting bypassed hydrocarbon zones, specifically oil and gas intervals, within a previously drilled reservoir. These zones, identified through gamma ray, resistivity, and bypassed gas signatures, represent producible pay that was overlooked, inadequately accessed, or not fully drained during initial development and production activities. Courtesy of David Olutusin.
field is not dead. Rather, it has theoretically reached peak production. Peak production is often constrained by deployable technology or economic viability and profitability. Incorporating collaborative digital platforms and technologies supports the effort to identify bypassed pay opportunities and ensure the company achieves maximum ROI in the field( Figure 1).
Cloud computing
For an oil company with adequate network infrastructure, moving computing to the cloud reduces the risk of cyberattacks that can effectively shut down oil production. This induces significant losses or increases the maintenance and recovery costs across multi-site servers.
energy-oil-gas. com 9