Twenty-thousand leagues under the sea it is not, but the Gulf of Mexico’s Lower Tertiary Trend, aka Paleogene, long ago captured the attention of the offshore oil and gas industry. As one of the few remaining offshore frontiers, it has both international and national oil companies actively exploring it for the hydrocarbon treasures deeply buried beneath its seafloor. Tapping the Trend is a risky and capex-intensive exercise that brings with it a set of known challenges—high temperatures and high pressures—and unknown challenges.

Extensive R&D efforts are underway to develop new technologies to face the challenges. This month’s cover story looks at one such effort, BP’s Project 20K. Another effort is being led by Baker Hughes’ Lower Tertiary integrated project team (IPT). This IPT is dedicated to understanding the challenges that operators are facing in the Lower Tertiary and delivering solutions to those challenges.

“The wells in the Lower Tertiary are very complex,” Jim Sessions, completions director and IPT lead, said. “There are multiple challenges getting to the pay zone, and then once we get to depth, there’s the case of ultimate recovery of hydrocarbons. It comes down to how do you extract it in the most efficient manner possible?”

Collaboration from within the company and with the client is an important component to the IPT’s ability to problem-solve. “What we’re finding as we go into more challenging environments, the Lower Tertiary being one, is that neither we as a service company nor our customer base has the experience on how to make these wells economical and solve some of the downhole challenges,” he said. “It’s important that we understand our client’s needs, challenges, economic drivers and then how it fits within the entire scope of the field. The IPT approach puts forth a dedicated resource without a lot of the day-to-day distractions to focus in on those challenges and to ensure that we address everything.”

This type of problem-solving is a different one for the company. “We’re taking a systems approach to solving Lower Tertiary challenges whereas before we created tools or just one piece of an overall system and then adapted it as needed,” he said.

“Here it’s a little bit different. We understand the challenges, and we’re adapting a wellhead-to-reservoir system. Everything is inclusive, top to bottom is fit for purpose to the Lower Tertiary to address this particular challenge. It’s a narrowing of the scope, putting the right people in the right place and then giving them all the tools to be successful to solve the challenge.”

This approach was put to the test by an operator in 2013 when the company worked with its client to complete and put its Lower Tertiary wells into production. “We had that early collaboration with the operator and were able to shorten the amount of time it took to complete the wells while also seeing incremental production throughout the later part of the campaign,” Sessions said.

Teamwork scores yet another victory in the Lower Tertiary.

Comments