Mike Bahorich

The oil and gas industry is notorious for its slowness to adopt new technology, but that does not mean new technology is slow to develop as a result. Whether it is a new method for horizontal fracturing, a technology from the gaming industry that will enable faster data processing, or using the latest innovations from the telecommunications industry to improve communications in remote areas, the breadth and depth of technology available to the industry is staggering.

As a technology ‘watch dog,’ Bahorich follows emerging technologies and encourages his colleagues at Apache Corp. to embrace them.

At Apache Corp., one of Mike Bahorich’s jobs is to keep his finger on the pulse of all of these new developments. With his company’s operations spanning the globe in some of the trickiest settings imaginable, he stays on the cutting edge to be sure his folks have access to what they need to get their jobs done in a competitive fashion.

Bahorich is executive vice president and technology officer, so he is a good person to ask about new and exciting advances. At the top of his list is the rapid improvement in multistage fracture stimulation technology. “Just a few years ago we would frac a horizontal well three or four times, and we thought that was pretty good,” he said. “Now our base case in some areas is 20.”

Multistage fracturing applies fracture treatments at different locations along the well bore, resulting in what he referred to as “independent small wells.” The number of fractures obviously increases production, and a 20-stage frac can produce up to 20 times the amount of a single vertical well bore, though not always.

This technology has had such a profound effect on opening up new natural gas plays in North America that Bahorich calls it “the invention.” “Just a decade ago we had a gas bubble in North America – we just had too much gas,” he said. “Then we popped that bubble, and we got to where we were actually struggling to find enough gas.

“Suddenly, with this invention we now have more than a 100-year supply ahead of us,” he added. “The invention has caused a supply glut of natural gas, so operators are now using it to produce oil, condensate, and natural gas liquids, which have higher profit potential.”

Being a geophysicist by training, Bahorich also keeps tabs on advances in seismic technology. One that excites him is the development in land acquisition techniques, where up to 100,000 channels can be recorded 24/7 with a shot density that “far surpasses what we used to think was practical,” he said. “We’re getting off a shot every five seconds now, and with simultaneous sources, we are reducing that further.”

Additionally, advances in compute power have led to vastly improved algorithms and processing techniques such as reverse-time migration, which is now becoming routine.

In his job as technology watch dog, he plans to continue keeping his eye out for anything that improves recovery, such as multistage fracturing. “In the next 10 years we’re going to see a nice uplift in that area,” he said. “I don’t think we’re nearly done.”

He added that to truly understand and characterize the shale plays will require an understanding of petrophysics “from the nano scale up to the reservoir scale. We need a better understanding of why some unconventional reservoirs work better than others and how to get the most out of them.”

Bahorich graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia and has a master’s degree in geophysics from Virginia Tech. Prior to joining Apache in 1996 he worked for Amoco, both in prospect generation and development and in research. While in that position he invented two geophysical concepts that are now widely used in the industry, including the Coherence Cube, the first method developed for directly viewing faults within a seismic image. He received the Virgil Kauffman award from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists in 1998.