Applied Petroleum Technology and Equinor cooperate to extract more information from reduced data acquisition programs

The oil and gas industry has for years seen reductions in capital expenditure for exploitation of oil and gas resources. Combined with the need to reduce climate gas emissions this has resulted in continued pressure to reduce the cost and scope of data acquisition programs, increasing efficiency and reducing rig time should have a concomitant reduction in the carbon intensity of the activity.

This pressure creates a need for methodologies that more effectively provide insight into the character of petroleum fluids in the absence of downhole samples.

APT and Equinor have agreed to jointly develop new solutions to satisfy this need. Through the initiation of a common R&D-project the companies will develop pragmatic solutions, using geochemical analysis, to extract the required information from reduced data sets. The aimed for outcomes of the project will allow engineers to deploy geochemical techniques to enhance understanding of hydrocarbon reservoirs using proxies that are cheaper and easier to obtain than the downhole samples used historically.

The goal of this joint R&D-project is to determine solutions which enable operators to replace acquisition programs such as downhole fluid sampling, PLTs or wireline logging with robust, cost-efficient solutions. This requires the development of workflows that overcome challenges which arise when applying geochemistry data, such as mitigating the impact of OBM contamination and when reducing the variety of tools that can be used, reducing resolution and the fidelity of the data acquired.

The ability to answer fundamental questions to all operators, such as:

• Is the reservoir phase oil or gas?
• What is the quality of the petroleum in the reservoir, and how does it vary?
• Which zone or zones is contributing to production?

will be addressed in the R&D-cooperation. This multi-million R&D-project involves development and testing of analytical instrumentation, execution and verification of experimental methodologies, tool deployment, and optimisation.