E&P Magazine - October 2005
As I See It
Operators re-discover shale gas value
Shale is the new game in town, and here's what it takes to win.
Cover Story
Industry faces ultra deep
Excitement is brewing among many long experienced hands in the offshore oilpatch when they see what is being found in the ultra deep in the Gulf of Mexico.
Drilling Technologies
Competent drillers are premium stock
This column is the fifth in a six-part series on drilling practices and improvement based on an industry study by James Miller & Co.
Completions and Production
'Green' fluids attack 'red' conditions
Ester-based drilling fluids deliver outstanding performance, even under extreme borehole and formation conditions.
Special Report
Tech Trends
Because subsurface injection achieves zero discharge by returning drilled cuttings to their origin, it is becoming the preferred disposal solution
Features
Greece is underexplored
Western Greece hosts active oil seeps.
Tech Watch
Time to let technology in
A popular cliché characterizes business as a three-legged stool. With one of the legs gone lame, will the other two step up to the task?
Activity Highlights
Gasoline fumes
I can't really blame my fellow Houstonians for venting when they fill up their tanks.
Activity Spotlight
News & Analysis
Read about events affecting worldwide oil and gas
Another Perspective
A new deepwater development concept
Long-distance delivery management will help facilitate frontier technology development while making long-distance delivery systems possible.
AVO analysis demystified
Amplitude variation with offset interpretation doesn't have to be a black box.
Brownfields applications for MPD
The ability to apply backpressure on the annulus at the surface offers significant benefits when drilling in mature fields and produced formations.
Custom-fit completions control sanding
Expandable multizone completions in unconsolidated strata help lock sand in place, and new swellable packer technology helps achieve zonal isolation.
Experience blunts Katrina's wrath
Operators learn from 100-year hurricane to minimize damage.
High risks demand high tech
A multipath screen system provides multiple benefits for an Egyptian deepwater sand control completion in the prolific deep offshore gas play of the Nile Delta.
HP/HT design issues in depth
High pressure/high temperature conditions raise a number of critical issues for successful design of deepwater pipelines.
Models provide insight
Physical modeling improves efficiency for deepwater subsea field architecture development.
Powerful czars
Ivan and Katrina: Are there more where they came from?
Technology opens UK secrets
New entrants are cutting a competitive edge by applying rock physics and quantitative seismic interpretation.
The caveat of scale
A new type of seismic attribute helps interpreters make the leap from the macro-scale to the micro-scale.
Today's production challenges
Production improvement may be summarized as the delivering of incremental productivity by applying a systematic approach that turns problems into opportunities.
UBD techniques optimize performance
Underbalanced drilling enables operators to more efficiently exploit a wide range of reservoir environments.
Understanding the geomechanics risk
A new tool is taking the guesswork out of assessing drilling and completion hazards.
What to manage in MPD
While the equipment for managed-pressure drilling offers much greater control, realizing the advantages of this technology requires careful planning and real-time management of the window between pore pressure and fracture gradient.
World Map
Everything old is new again
New tools help explorationists mine data the old-fashioned way.