A Report on the Proceedings of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) ATCE Conference 2007 Anaheim.

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/77a2b0/society_of_petrole) has announced the addition of the "Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) ATCE Conference 2007 Proceedings: Anaheim" report to their offering.

The Society of Petroleum Engineers 2007 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (ATCE) claimed an 8,000 plus attendance with 380 papers presented and 400 exhibitors. On the 'digital oilfield' front, Landmark introduced 'AssetConnect' a production optimization platform that uses a modeling package from the automotive industry. The French Petroleum Institute (IFP) presented the results of a joint industry project (with Total) using a modeling standard (CAPE-OPEN) from the process industry, to simulate from wellbore to facility. Schlumberger's Avocet Integrated Asset Management package was featured in a paper about a revamp of Pemex' San Manuel complex. Petroleum Experts has added an API to its Integrated Field Management package so that it too can be used in customized optimization workflows. TNO was showing some modeling technology that couples multi scale (time and space) models for studying production instabilities such as slugging and gas coning.

Uncertainty and decision making continues to be a hot topic at the SPE. A presentation from Texas A&M called for a re-evaluation of current commercial offerings, with more focus on decision support as opposed to 'uncertainty' analysis. Global warming was featured in the SPE 'Carbon' Forum session where USC's George Chillingar's iconoclastic views were enthusiastically greeted by a large audience. This dwindled considerably for the more politically correct presentations from EnCana and ONGC.

In our report from the 2003 SPE, we cited an operator who, referring to the increasing sophistication of downhole monitoring and control systems said, 'I don't want jewelry in my wells!' Judging from the 2007 edition of the SPE's ATCE, 'jewelry' is, if not everywhere, at least getting good traction. The obvious targets for sophisticated downhole control valves and real time monitoring are the newer offshore developments and the supergiants of the Middle East. But there are applications for the high-end technology in 'cost sensitive' brown fields too.

The first deployment of Baker Hughes' 'Intellipipe' drill string 'Ethernet' was reported by StatoilHydro's Henrik Wolter. Tests on the Troll supergiant gas field in a 2700m lateral proved very successful in high frequency geosteering around large calcite nodules in the reservoir. Today's data rates are 9,600 bps compared with 20 bps for conventional mud pulse transmission.

Microsoft's Windows Compute Cluster Server (WCCS) 20032 was introduced on the Schlumberger booth with rather more razzmatazz than science. The idea is that WCCS will be easier to deploy in smaller organizations' all-Windows environments. Schlumberger provided an underwhelming benchmark, stating that Eclipse on WCCS offers 'similar performance to a Linux machine, at least for up to 8 processors.'

Key Topics Covered:

- Introductory note - SPE paper references

- Presidential addresses - Jaleel Al-Khalifa (2007) and Bill Cobb (2008)

- 'Carbon' session

- Drilling Automation special session

- Attended Papers

- Exhibitors

- Other papers of interest

- IT Technical Section

- The Data Room - Technology Watch subscription information

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