Ongoing research aims to help oil patch work smarter

Halliburton's employees work at a three wellhead fracking site Monday, June 26, 2017, in Midland. ( Steve Gonzales / Houston Chronicle ) Halliburton's employees work at a three wellhead fracking site Monday, June 26, 2017, in Midland. ( Steve Gonzales / Houston Chronicle ) Photo: Steve Gonzales/Houston Chronicle Photo: Steve Gonzales/Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Ongoing research aims to help oil patch work smarter 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Working smarter, not harder, has been paying off for Permian Basin producers, especially in the current low oil price environment.

Technology has been credited with opening the floodgates of unconventional shales and with helping producers widen those floodgates even as oil prices fell from their triple-digit heights. Technology is expected to help continue that trend.

A down cycle in the industry “demands that technology provide solutions high prices cannot solve,” Stephen Ingram, vice president of technology solutions and innovation for Halliburton’s North America operations said in a phone interview from his Houston office.

“There’s a tremendous amount left to research and optimize,” he said.

Unconventional resource development has been ongoing for a number of years now, moving from the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth to the Eagle Ford in South Texas to the Permian Basin, Ingram said.

“All that research, all those thought processes from the Eagle Ford and the Barnett are being brought to bear in the Permian Basin. There is tremendous innovation happening in the Permian. In the next few years, the Permian will become an exporter of technology and innovation,” he said.

Drilling is one area he cited.

“Not so much research as taking existing technology used in other industries and applying it,” he said, listing automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence as such technology that can help cut drilling costs.

The company’s first smart rig in Cameron is aiding in research to test advanced software and algorithms in partnership with other companies, Ingram said. The goal is to cut the number of days it takes to drill a well and make the rig more efficient, resulting in a more efficient use of capital, he said.

Applying lessons learned from that research “will make the Permian Basin more competitive than it is,” he said.

Ingram said research that is unique to the Permian Basin involves the huge volume of locally sourced frac sand that is being tested for and is in the process of being utilized in hydraulic fracturing jobs. He said that sand is of higher quality than what is being imported and could result in sand costs being lower and the quality being better, thus making the wells more productive.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to build out the infrastructure. There is work being done to see if the sand is usable, and if it is usable if it can be used in all the stacked plays,” Ingram said.

There is also a lot of research being done around chemistry, including surfactants and clays.

“The Permian Basin has been drilled and produced for many decades. It has the most complex reservoir system, unique and challenging rock type,” Ingram said. “All the rock types, especially those that are drilled today horizontally and those in further development, have unique responses to fracturing. The water comes out with different characterizations (than when it went in).

“It has different chemicals and minerals from interaction with the formation. Some are positive, some are negative with response to production,” he said.

One example is clays, Ingram said. When water is added, either the clays swell and reduce the well’s ability to produce, or they will become brittle and fracture into what he called fines that will hamper production.

“This is a big area of research,” he said.

Halliburton and the University of Wyoming are partnering to study the impact of rock type and the impact of chemicals that currently are being used and will be used in the future. The research includes cores from the Permian Basin and from the Denver-Julesberg Basin.

“We have quite a bit of opportunity to enhance well productivity and total productivity from those wells,” Ingram said. “Clay chemistry and surfactant chemistry will allow for much more competitive operators and much more competitive production as we expand the core areas of production.”

That leads into artificial lift and how to effectively produce wells for the long-term.

Ingram said today’s unconventional shale wells come on strong initially for a number of months before rates decline and settle into a long-term cycle.

The issue with artificial lift technology, particularly the electrical submersible pumps used in the Permian, is they can become clogged by the sand used in fracturing jobs, forcing operators to pull them and install new pumps. A new system, the SandWedge can be used as part of the frac fluid system to reduce sand flowback, keeping the pumps working longer and more effectively.

The biggest mystery that could help improve productivity and efficiency is what lies under the surface. Ingram said Halliburton has partnered with three other companies to research ways to image the subsurface, such as fractures.

In what Ingram called the largest field operation in Halliburton history, the company is outfitting 10 wellbores in the Delaware Basin with fiber optic cable to record downhole pressures and temperatures. Three have already been outfitted, and when all 10 are outfitted, he said researchers can observe the frac treatments currently being done on the wells through microseismic sensors.

“It’s all part of our drive to understand key components,” he said. “How big is the fracture, how close should each stage be, should perforations be along the wellbore, and how close should wellbores be to each other.”

Drilling these unconventional shale wells is very capital-intensive “big money projects,” he said, and better understanding what’s happening in the wellbores reduces the risks of undercapitalizing or overcapitalizing the projects.