One way to address this skills and experience shortage is to increase productivity among the current staff. In an Offshore magazine article, E&P software can be profit enabler in tough times, Emerson’s Garrett Leahy and Indy Chakrabarti open describing this challenge:
The result is that operators are now struggling to both quantify the value of potential opportunities and put in place the right strategies to deliver profitable production again.
Exploration & production (E&P) software can play a role in helping solve this challenge in three areas:
…brownfield development via intelligent well planning and cost models; increasing recovery factors through predictive reservoir models; and expanding production efficiencies based on a complete overview of the field.
Garrett and Indy share an example of a North Sea oil & gas producers whose brownfield projects have increased production 16% since 2014. This growth is due to software advancements supporting better well planning to:
…find and exploit bypassed zones in the reservoir by allowing engineers to set drilling parameters for each trajectory and compute well path uncertainty and collision risks.
By adding cost models, alternative drilling scenarios and field production concepts can be evaluated.
These technologies make infill drilling an attractive method for increasing recovery rates without a major new infrastructure spend.
Read the article for more on how machine learning has been incorporated geological rock-type distributions and workflows for incorporating seismic attributes—pre-stack and/or post-stack. Also, how reservoir management software such as The Big Loop integrates static and dynamic domains, ensuring that all reservoir uncertainties are captured and used as input parameters to the reservoir simulator.
For more, visit the Reservoir Management Software area of Emerson.com and connect and interact with other oil & gas exploration and production industry experts in the Oil & Gas group in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.
