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AS SEEN IN
JULY 2015

Even with low oil prices, technology

still drives efficiency, cost savings
Service companies with technology that impacts efficiency, cost and risk
are seeing an increase in customers.

When service companies provide the technology to

F
Scott Weeden, Senior Editor, Drilling
meet those efficiencies and effectiveness, operators will
be looking for that technology, even in a down market.
ewer wells are being drilled, yet oil and gas produc-
tion remains at very high levels, with natural gas and Reducing well interventions
crude oil storage heading for record volumes. Operators To paraphrase the movie Field of Dreams, If you build it,
continue to push for even greater cost reductions in they will come. Magnum Oil Tools worked to develop a
tools and services than the 20% to 30% that have dissolvable plug for hydraulic fracturing. In 2012 the
already occurred. company brought its experience in zonal isolation to the
How do service companies deliver improved pro- table, partnering with Kureha Corp. and utilizing its
duction in the face of unique material to
those lower costs? The develop a dissolvable
answer is technology. line of completion
Operators continue tools. In March 2013
to focus on saving Magnum launched the
time, decreasing costs first of these products,
and reducing risks. which was called the
What they are looking Fastballa dissolvable
for are ways to make frack ball for sliding-
the well completions sleeve completions.
more efficient and On the heels of the
cost-effective, Fastballs introduction,
explained Garrett Fra- further R&D resulted
zier, director of sales in the release of the
and marketing, Mag- Magnum Vanishing
num Oil Tools. Plug (MVP), a dissolv-
The operators are Packers Plus field hands prepares the e-PLUS Retina system for running able frack plug used in
looking for efficien- in the well. (Source: Packers Plus) plug-and-perf (PNP)
cies. Theyre looking completions. The MVP
for the ability to understand that theyve stimulated the eliminates the plug drill-out process, enabling operators
wellbore to the best of their ability, Joe DeGeare, pres- to save significant time, money and risks associated with
ident, U.S. sales and operations, NCS Multistage LLC, well intervention.
told E&P. Instead of waiting for coiled tubing [CT] to drill out the
Dan Themig, president and CEO, Packers Plus plugs, clean out the well and then take it to production, all
Energy Services, speaking at Hart Energys DUG Per- an operator has to do is pump that last frack, change out
mian Conference May 20, said, Theres a huge upside the frack valve on location to a production tree and send
in driving efficiencies in our industry. One thing I the well straight to production, he explained.
think we sometimes overlook is effectiveness of our This is certainly a step-change technology. We just
existing completion practices. Driving costs down is released it in October 2014. Were really starting to push
only part of it. Our goal is to move those cumulative a lot of products. Were still in a hiring mode in that serv-
curves up as well. ice department to satisfy all the demand, Frazier said.

July 2015 | EPmag.com

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The third generation of isolation valves, called FORTRESS, is more debris-tolerant and
offers new mechanical triggers for flexibility in design. (Source: Schlumberger)
Thousands of stages per month are still being fracked
even in this downturn, and operators are looking for sig-
nificant ways to optimize their operations, he contin-
ued. This new technology is completely eliminating the
well intervention process, and operators are reporting
that these benefits are invaluable.
At the time of the MVP launch in October 2014,
approximately one month before the crash in oil prices,
potential savings of eliminating CT were substantially
higher than in todays market. However, Frazier noted,
Even though the pricing has declined on the cost of the
CT operations by somewhere around 50%, Magnums
dissolvable technology continues to make advances in
more efficient and cost-effective completions.
Forty stages in 24 hours
Costs and time on the drilling side have been reduced
considerably. The biggest cost in bringing a well into
production is for completion. On the efficiency side,
how quickly can the completion work be accomplished?
NCS Multistage completed an 87-stage well in the
Powder River Basin in Wyoming for Devon Energy
Corp. in less than one hour per stage. All the fracks
were single-point injection using NCS Multistages CT
frack system. The company set a record with 40 fracks
in 24 hours with an average of 36 minutes per stage,
DeGeare said.
Casing sleeves were run and cemented as part of the
production casing string. The frack-isolation tool was
run on CT to open each sleevein a single CT run.
When compared with [PNP], which was used on nearby
wells, we saved them several days of work, he added.
What operators are doing is looking at new technolo-
gies to have better conductivity to the wellbore and have
the assurance that they have stimulated the wellbore at
every point of injection, he explained.
July 2015 | EPmag.com
COVER STORY:
COMPLETIONS
With this technology NCS Multistage
also reduced the footprint in the frack
spread by reducing the required horse-
power on location by about two-thirds.
All of that adds to their bottom line.
Were gaining new customers all the time.
Last month we worked for six new cus-
tomers. This month weve got another
three or four new customers. We just fin-
ished our first well in the Marcellus, and
weve just delivered equipment to do a
Utica well, he continued.
With our system, when were done with
the frack we can put the well on produc-
tion. Were saving operators several days by
putting production online more quickly, DeGeare said.
Three new strategies for effectiveness
Being able to make an impact on poor cluster efficiency
is a goal of many operators. Themig discussed three
technologies that could impact reservoir effectiveness.
The first is rapid execution strategy, which involves
generating fracture complexity to affect rock mechanics
of the reservoir. Painted Pony Production Ltd., for
example, improved its type curve from 142 MMcm to
382 MMcm (5 Bcf to 13.5 Bcf) in the Montney play in
Canada. The rapid execution strategy involves drilling a
pair of parallel horizontal wells. One lateral is quickly
fractured and shut in with no flowback. The second lat-
eral is then fracked. The goal is to create complex frac-
tures between the two laterals. Openhole completions
respond particularly well to this method, he explained.
A second strategy is to ensure flawless execution. Packers
Plus introduced its e-PLUS Retina monitoring system to
collect and analyze real-time data that can detect a ball that
fails to launch or double-shift on a stage, he continued.
The third strategy is the use of dual and triple later-
als from the same wellbore. It is possible to design
wellbore construction to do downspace drilling from
existing wellbores. This can include dual laterals,
he emphasized.
Evolving isolation valve technology
In long laterals debris can be a problem in activating iso-
lation valves. For the past five years Schlumberger has
been developing a debris-tolerant isolation valve that
provides both modularity and flexibility.
Weve installed more than 1,800 isolation valves in
more than 40 countries and 44 clients. We have a diverse
portfolio of valves, and we are on our third generation
of isolation valves, which is called the FORTRESS pre-
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COVER STORY:
COMPLETIONS
mium isolation valve, said Ali Adlene Arraour, product
line manager for safety and isolation valves, Comple-
tions, Schlumberger.
It has become very clear that our clients are aiming
for longer reach, deeper wells with more clusters and
different laterals. The use of this kind of isolation valve
becomes a necessity, he emphasized.
More than one year was spent debris-testing the new
valve. We compared the actuation force required to
open a valve between our old generation and new gener-
ation. This helped us modify our design, especially for
the ball and mechanical sections. By doing the debris
test, we found that the activation force for the old gener-
ation valve in a debris-filled well required more than
123% activation force. The new FORTRESS design
greatly reduced this requirement to only 15%, added
Alaa Fouad, isolation valves product champion, Comple-
tions, Schlumberger.
What the designers did was eliminate more passes that
may cause debris to settle out. They reinforced the
design by creating a full-bore ball valve. Now the tool is
HART ENERGY | 1616 S. VOSS, STE. 1000, HOUSTON, TX 77057 USA | +1 713 260 6400 | FAX +1 713 840 8585
more stable and debris-tolerant, Arraour said.
We recently closed out a project in the Middle East of
over 100 valves used with an electric submersible pump
completion. We saw 100% success on the installation,
he continued.
Complementing the proven installation processes that
were developed, product reliability was greatly improved, he
said. A well in Malaysia was suspended for 4.4 years. The iso-
lation valve was opened remotely the first time as per plan,
and the well began producing with no issues, he added.
The first isolation valves were only activated with a
nitrogen (N) trigger. The modularity and flexibility in the
new generation FORTRESS valve comes from the new
triggers (S, N and HP) to meet different well conditions:
S-trigger is pressure-driven, uses no nitrogen and has
a reduced risk from debris locking;
N-trigger is nitrogen-activated and can be cus-
tomized for any depth of well or completion fluid;
and
HP-trigger is designed for HT/HP wells up to 177 C
[350 F] and 25,000-psi reservoir pressure.
July 2015 | EPmag.com