Increased industry emphasis on development of fully integrated completion and production systems and production optimization has spurred construction of a world-class engineering facility.

With no small amount of fanfare, Schlumberger revealed its newly-expanded Reservoir Completions Center (SRC) to more than 200 customers and guests at the company's 460-acre campus near Rosharon, Texas. Located about 30 miles (48 km) south of Houston, the site has a long history with the company. In the early 1950s, a single engineer and five technicians established a small office in the middle of a flat, featureless prairie to test shaped charges and perforating gun assemblies. With no neighbors for a mile in any direction, the site was perfect for development and testing of high explosives technology.

Today, there still few signs of civilization in the neighborhood, but the new SRC stands out like a space-age oasis with more than a dozen major engineering, manufacturing and testing buildings sited on a landscaped campus. The latest expansion is the huge well completions engineering building and reliability testing facility. The site looks more like a modern technical university than an industrial complex.

The SRC behaves more like an applied technology development institution than a manufacturing facility with emphasis on providing customized solutions for the company's clients worldwide. For example, when China National Offshore Operating Company (CNOOC) needed to fine tune an offshore reservoir offshore Indonesia, Schlumberger developed and installed the world's first TAML Level 6 multilateral intelligent completion that used dual-opposed lateral branches to drain a single reservoir. Characterized by high water fraction, the reservoir required delicate production metering from each lateral to optimize production. The intelligent completion provided a significant increase in oil production from the well. Payout was achieved in 30 days.

Touring the center, one gets the impression that each project is receiving individual attention of scientists and engineers along with intense scrutiny by quality assurance teams. In the test facility, 14 high pressure/high temperature test bays perform thorough testing of components and assemblies in realistic well conditions, with every aspect monitored from a central control room featuring an adjacent client observation area. Test wells can cycle from 40°F to 550°F (4.4°C to 288°C) at pressures up to 30,000 psi. In addition, a new field test facility in East Texas provides the ability to drill and complete real wells at will to test new designs and solutions. Presently, the facility is drilling a well with a 600-ft (183-m) horizontal drain hole to test a complete offshore completion string.

Perforating technology is still very much a part of the SRC repertoire. Visitors were shown a unique polyaxial rock-stress simulator that allows drilled Berea sandstone targets containing cemented casing to be perforated while under realistic downhole stresses and reservoir pressure. According to the company, this is the only way to actually measure charge performance under actual downhole conditions, a key factor in developing optimal solutions. The simulator plays a major role in Schlumberger's Perforating for Ultimate Reservoir Exploitation (PURE) strategy. Charges and gun systems, developed and tested at the perforating research facility allowed ChevronTexaco to eliminate acid washes to clean up completion-skin in Wyoming saving the company US $600,000. Additionally, in an Alaska injector well, a 20-ft (6-m) reservoir section shot using PURE technology outperformed an adjacent 90-ft (27-m) section shot conventionally by a factor of 9:1.

Subsea wells, now growing exponentially worldwide, receive special emphasis at SRC. The company uses a holistic approach that includes subsea surveillance and monitoring, subsea boosting and subsea flow assurance. This is enabled by a new Subsea Monitoring and Control (SMC) pod that works like a "plug-and-play" device. It can be inserted in a subsea wellhead by a remotely operated vehicle, and can be customized to measure any parameters the customer wants. The SMC employs open architecture and non-proprietary protocols so it is fully compatible with legacy systems or future additions. In effect, the SMC establishes a 100-150 MByte/sec LAN that de-bottlenecks the acquisition and communication of vital field data.

Judging from the comments and questions from other visitors touring the new SRC, the work being done there represents core competency in every aspect of innovative design, manufacturing and quality assurance that is needed to achieve production optimization anywhere oil and gas is found.

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