"Emerging and Peripheral Technologies". Petroleum Engineering Handbook Vol. 6

In fact, most of these technologies either were in their infancy or did not exist at the time that edition was prepared. Several of these topics have been selected because they represent areas of technology for which sufficient technical progress has now been achieved to result in large-scale commercialization.
In some cases, these chapters cover aspects of the technologies presented in the other volumes, but here, specific chapters describe unique technology developed either in what could be described as being on the “periphery” of these five volumes or as “emerging” areas of technology that have “budded and blossomed” during the past two decades. Some of these technologies have been developing very rapidly during the period that this Handbook went from inception to completion.
These 12 chapters can be divided among the following categories:
• Improving reservoir description by use of interwell reservoir data extracted from 3D seismic surveys and by quantitatively estimating the variability of the reservoir description away from the wellbores - Chapter 1, Reservoir Geophysics, and Chapter 2, Geologically Based, Geostatistical Reservoir Modeling
• Making wellbores “smarter” and taking some facility operations closer to the reservoir by designing the wellbore to include devices to sense the pressure and production from various reservoir intervals and then be capable of automatically altering the completion to response to these changes; and by moving some of the oil/gas/water separation facilities to the ocean floor or even into the wellbore near the reservoir interval - Chapter 3, Intelligent-Well Completions, and Chapter 4, Subsea and Downhole Processing
• Extracting oil and gas from geologic formations known to be hydrocarbon-bearing but requiring new technology to bring about economic development by rethinking the whole concept of what production means for unconsolidated heavy-oil reservoirs; by developing an understanding of the nature of the gas resource in deeper coal deposits and how to achieve economically productive gas wells; and by developing hydraulic-fracturing technology to the point that very-low-permeability gas-bearing sands, siltstones, and shales can be technically and economically developed - Chapter 5, Cold Heavy-Oil Production With Sand; Chapter 6, Coalbed Methane; and Chapter 7, Tight Gas Reservoirs
• Discussing the technical options for bringing to market gas fields in remote areas by considering the cost/benefit relationships for converting the gas from a gaseous phase to a high-density gas or to a liquid by cooling, or by chemically altering the methane to create other hydrocarbon compounds
- Chapter 8, Monetizing Stranded Gas
• Presenting the technology required to extract geothermal energy from the Earth by using many conventional oilfield methods, but with special requirements for the subsurface conditions where very high temperatures are found shallower than normal, the rocks are generally very low porosity but fractured, and the fluids of interest are steam and hot water - Chapter 9, Geothermal Engineering
• Quantifying risk using a variety of mathematical techniques as needed to improve how decisions are made in the oil and gas industry - Chapter 10, Risk and Decision Analysis
• Discussing two areas that are of interest to the oil and gas industry but are in the preliminary phases of technology development; these will require a considerable amount of additional experimental work and pilot testing before commercialization can occur
- Chapter 11, Hydrate Emerging Technologies, and Chapter 12, Electromagnetic Heating of Oil
This volume is not all-inclusive; there are likely other technologies that could have been addressed, such as the technical developments associated with deepwater oil and gas fields’ reservoir engineering and production and facilities considerations. The topics included were selected by Editor-in-Chief Larry Lake and me to provide a reasonable range of emerging and peripheral technologies.