Equinor and Applied Petroleum Technology (APT) have joined forces in a R&D project that aims to replace costly downhole sampling and logging with more cost-efficient solutions.
“How can we extract more relevant information that helps operators find and produce more oil and gas despite having access to fewer data sources? This is the challenge we aim to solve together with Equinor,” says Helge Nyrønning, CEO of APT.
The oil and gas industry’s drive to reduce both its cost level and climate gas emissions has resulted in continued pressure to reduce the cost and scope of data acquisition programs.
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 will cooperate to extract more information from reduced data acquisition programs. The joint R&D project will develop pragmatic solutions, using geochemical analysis, to extract the required information from reduced data sets, including enabling operators to replace acquisition programmes such as downhole fluid sampling, production logging or wireline logging with more robust and cost-efficient solutions.
“Equinor’s ambition is to reduce its group-wide emissions by 50 percent by 2030, and we aim to realise 90 percent of this ambition by absolute reductions. Extracting more data from current sources without having to execute more downhole operations could be one way of reducing both emission levels and operating costs,” says Vibeke Haugen, technology manager at Equinor.
The R&D project involves development and testing of analytical instrumentation, execution and verification of experimental technologies and tool deployment and optimization. This workflow will allow APT and Equinor to answer fundamental questions related to whether the reservoir phase is oil or gas, the quality of the petroleum in the reservoir and how it varies, and which zone or zones are contributing to production.
“The aim is to develop a methodology that allows engineers to deploy geochemical techniques to enhance understanding of hydrocarbon reservoirs using proxies that are less costly and easier to obtain than the downhole samples that have historically been used for exploration, EOR and IOR work,” adds Helge Nyrønning.
