Unconventional Resources Technology Conference Highlights Shale as an International Business
Authors: Rassenfoss Stephen , Whitfield Stephen , Jacobs Trent 
Published: August 2017

Thousands gathered in Austin, Texas, in July to attend the 2017 Unconventional Resources Technology Conference which reflected several of the biggest themes shaping the shale sector and its emergence as an internationally discussed business.

Several of the technical presentations highlighted the progress in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale play while international operators such as BHP Billiton and Statoil discussed development plans for their US assets.

Technical discussions held during the 3-day event, which is sponsored by the SPE, AAPG, and SEG, focused on emerging approaches to improving oil and gas recovery from tight rocks and exploring where the risks still lie with induced seismicity.

Other important themes such as applied data analytics solutions, improving refracturing techniques, and how to deal with interwell communication were also highlighted.

 

Will Shale Oil Ever Make Money? Quite Possibly Next Decade

Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor

The biggest unconventional oil producers have revolutionized global oil markets and driven down prices. Still on the list of things to do: Consistently turn in strong profits.

By the next decade, that is likely to change according to a report by Wood Mackenzie, which predicts margins will grow for the biggest, most efficient independents around 2020.

The actual prediction is “the five leading tight-oil specialists will start to deliver significant positive free cash flow in three years’ time, based on our USD 66/bbl Brent oil price assumption for 2020.”

Which would mean that five companies whose business depends on producing liquids and gas from ultratight formations—Continental, Devon, EOG, Newfield, and Pioneer—would begin generating considerably more cash than they are spending to produce far more barrels of oil per day than they are now.

“They will be transitioning out of the capital-intensive phase and moving into the harvest phase” as these enormous, long-term developments reach critical mass, said Benjamin Shattuck, principal upstream analyst for Wood Mackenzie, who was part of the team that produced the recent report: When Will Tight Oil Make Money?

 

Three Alternative Paths To Maximizing Unconventional Resources

Stephen Whitfield, Senior Staff Writer

As pioneering shale gas plays and tight oil formations mature and decline in production, operators are trying to find emerging formations and resources to replace them, enabling continued growth in US production. While the industry will continue identifying new domestic unconventional shale and tight sand resources, an expert said that the methods of discovery may differ from traditional approaches.

At the 2017 Unconventional Resources Technology Conference, Vello Kuuskraa discussed the alternative pathways companies may take to discover unconventional resources while maximizing existing plays in the near future. Kuuskraa is president of Advanced Resources International.

Kuuskraa’s presentation focused on three such pathways. He defined the first, “Looking in Your Own Backyard,” as the search for additional productive horizons in existing basins, either above or below already developed target formations. An example of such a strategy is the Meramec formation, located approximately 1,000 ft above the Cana-Woodford Shale in the northern portion of the Anadarko Basin.

 

A Typical Well is Hard To Define

Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor

A type curve is a quick way to answer a critical question—what does a typical well produce over time in a given place?

On the plus side this simple calculation can be done using only basic math skills. “The conventional approach is to determine the arithmetic average of production during a given month from different wells in a reservoir of interest to create a type well,” according to SPE 178525.

On the downside, the next sentence is: “This method is deeply flawed.”

The flaws include “different results by different evaluators” that are “overestimates or underestimates (usually overestimates” of future production, according to the paper, whose authors include John Lee, a professor at Texas A&M University who is well known for his work on reservoir production analysis.

The negatives have become all the more pronounced by the rise of unconventional oil and gas developments, where the output varies, and is unpredictable from well to well, with decline curves that do not fit conventional norms.

“The problems are simply different (and usually harder to solve) in unconventionals,” Lee said.

 

Validating the Smooth Success of HEAL System

Trent Jacobs, JPT Digital Editor

It has apparently taken one emerging technology to help validate another.

HEAL Systems is a joint-venture with Schlumberger which manufactures a downhole flow-regulating device by the same name. The innovation promises to remedy one of the unconventional sector’s most common problems: slug flow.

PipeFractionalFlow is a spinoff startup from the University of Texas at Austin that is using new theories and equations to make modeling complex multiphase more affordable.

Together, the two technology developers completed a simulation and history matching study on four horizontal wells in the US and Canada that shed light on how the HEAL system works. The research is detailed in an SPE paper published at the Unconventional Resources Technology Conference (URTeC 2670789).

 

Study Provides Guidelines for Community Input in Unconventional Development

Stephen Whitfield, Senior Staff Writer

A lack of community input can have a destructive impact on new unconventional energy projects, particularly in environmentally sensitive areas. However, a recent study conducted by Texas A&M University and the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) showed that while negative community opinion can be difficult for owners and operators to overcome, engaging in a dialogue with communities pre-development could have significant economic, social, and environmental benefits and should be a factor in any evaluation of a new project.

Speaking on the second day of the Unconventional Resources Technology Conference, Clark Adams, a professor emeritus in the Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences department at Texas A&M, outlined some of the steps companies could take to address community anxieties over new energy development. These steps were explained in a paper (URTeC 2664652) written by Marian Higgins, David Burnett, Urs Kreuter, and Richard Haut.