The Australian Story—recent technologies and future technology trends
Simon BittlestonVice President, Research, Schlumberger
The APPEA Journal 54(3) - https://doi.org/10.1071/AJ13146
Published: 30 June 2014
Abstract
The impressive growth in deep-water resources worldwide is being mirrored in the significant advances in Australian deep-water resources. These challenging fields demand major technology advances in exploration, development and production. Whilst onshore shale-gas production is limited, Australia has potentially huge regions to develop in addition to large coal seam gas reserves; the key question will be how to do so in an efficient and cost-effective manner, with the minimum environmental footprint.
For both these opportunities, technologies are needed to accurately characterise the reserves; precisely target the drilling operations to allow optimal reservoir contact, and to produce the hydrocarbons effectively by being able to monitor and control the production operations. Overall efficiency will be achieved through: integration, particularly for well construction and completions; reliability, especially for deep-water production systems; and model-based control, to provide optimal performance and event identification across all well activities.
This talk will cover four recent technologies, which highlight the types of advances needed to explore, develop and produce these reserves. These examples will illustrate the underlying trends in technology development and implementation; in particular the growing need for system level analysis, subsystem integration and automated monitoring and control.
Future advances will require greater resources dedicated towards fundamental Research, to lead the industry beyond what is current the baseline understanding. They will also require greater collaboration across and beyond our industry.
Simon Bittleston is presently Vice President of Research for Schlumberger. The company has research centers in Boston, Cambridge (UK), Moscow, Rio, Stavanger, Edmonton, Houston and Dhahran, covering all aspects of oil-field activities. Having been awarded a PhD in fluid mechanics, he joined Schlumberger in 1985 and worked at Schlumberger Cambridge Research. After becoming a research programme manager, he moved to Norway in 1993 and became domain manager for the development of Marine Seismic systems where he was responsible for the development of Q-Marine. In 1999, he returned to the UK as a Research Director, and then in 2001 moved to Houston as VP Product Development, which included all Product Development and Manufacturing for Schlumberger. In 2005, he moved to Paris and became VP of Mergers and Acquisitions—the team completed more than 40 investments culminating in the Smith acquisition. In 2012, Simon was made VP of research based in Cambridge, UK; he is also a By-Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge and Fellow of Darwin College Cambridge. He is married with three children. |
