A Vision for Future Upstream Technologies
Authors: Saggaf M.M. 
Published: June 2014

Distinguished Author Series articles are general, descriptive representations that summarize the state of the art in an area of technology by describing recent developments for readers who are not specialists in the topics discussed. Written by individuals recognized as experts in the area, these articles provide key references to more definitive work and present specific details only to illustrate the technology. Purpose: to inform the general readership of recent advances in various areas of petroleum engineering.

This paper presents the author's vision of the most influential technologies for the next 2 decades. Unabated global demand for energy will translate into growing demand for traditional hydrocarbon resources. This growing demand represents a significant challenge to which the industry must respond. Several companies have announced ambitious expansion plans for the next several years. However, demand growth is expected to be a long-term phenomenon, for which new technologies must be developed to increase the effectiveness by which hydrocarbon resources are found, developed, and produced.

The paper briefly reviews technologies that the author considers most influential in the past decades, namely 3Dseismic data, horizontal drilling, and geosteering. Each of these technologies has had a profound effect on the industry, emerging from humble beginnings to mainstream applications. Next, the author discusses his vision of the potentially most influential future technologies. These technologies include extreme-reservoir-contact wells, smart inflow-control devices, autonomous fields, passive-seismic monitoring, gigacell simulation, smart fluids, bionic wells, and nanorobots. Though most of these are just dreams, significant strides that have been made to achieve them are highlighted.

Challenges of the Future

The oil industry, especially the upstream sector, has received much attention lately. Some attention has been positive, and some not so positive. This attention stems from many factors, including the rising global demand for energy in general (oil in particular). The world currently has a high demand for energy (Energy Information Administration, 2005), and the demand is anticipated to increase over the next few decades by 2-3% annually (Energy Information Administration, 2006). As Fig. 1 shows, the world's energy usage is expected to increase by approximately 50% in the next 20 years.

Although the supply from alternative sources of energy (e.g., nuclear and renewable energy) is increasing, the increase is expected to be small. Though estimates of future growth vary, the consensus is that the main role of these alternative energy sources, at least for the next 2 decades, will be to complement and supplement—rather than replace—the use of hydrocarbons. Therefore, most of the increase in the world's energy demand will have to be met with traditional hydrocarbon sources such as oil and gas, which will continue to dominate the energy market. Meeting this demand will be a challenge.

However, the rising global demand for oil is not the only challenge ahead of us. This rise in demand is coupled with decreasing supplies from some areas of the world, including the North Sea. Additional challenges include increasing geopolitical tension in several places around the world that are critical to the supply of oil; public misconceptions about the future of oil, fueled by misleading reports that tend to mix science with fiction; general confusion about alternative sources of energy and their role and timing in key sectors such as transportation; and unprecedented levels of public concern about the environment and climate change.