A new deepwater imaging service, field tested in Australia, has set its sights on providing drillers with clear vision through oil-based muddied waters.

Schlumberger’s Quanta Geo photorealistic reservoir geology service, unveiled this week at the Offshore Northern Seas Annual Conference and Exhibition in Stavanger, Norway, features the energy industry’s first microresistivity imager designed to produce oriented, photorealistic, core-like images of formations in wells drilled with oil-based mud (OBM). The images appear in 3-D, allowing drillers to interpret geological features and predict reservoir trends with a high degree of certainty.

“Geological imaging in wells drilled with OBM has long been recognized by operators as a major technical challenge, particularly in deep water,” Hinda Gharbi, president of Schlumberger’s Wireline unit, said in a released statement. “The Quanta Geo service provides photorealistic images that can be used to condition and constrain reservoir models, enabling our customers to better understand their reservoirs and make decisions with more confidence.”

Quanta Geo’s high-resolution array sneaks past the electrically resistive barrier erected by OBM. Down-logging is accelerated to up to 3,600 ft/hour, resulting in a reduction in rig time that mitigates operational risk. The data are rendered in Schlumberger’s Techlog wellbore software for analysis by geologists.

In addition to Australia, the Quanta Geo service was tested in more than 50 deepwater, unconventional and carbonate wells in the Gulf of Mexico, West Africa, North Sea and North America.

Joseph Markman can be reached at jmarkman@hartenergy.com.

Comments