Equinor and Aker BP have agreed to collaborate to develop tight offshore reservoirs on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). 

They will target application of emerging technologies, standardization and greater scale to achieve economic development of more discoveries in this category and increase the oil and gas recovery.

The Norwegian Offshore Directorate (NOD) has been calling for greater urgency to unlock oil and gas from tight reservoirs, which it estimates at about 2.8 Bboe from roughly 90 discoveries.

Many of these finds remain to be developed.

Tight reservoirs, the new partners explained, have low permeability, causing oil and gas to flow very slowly through the rock.

Using conventional techniques, only small volumes of this resource can currently be produced, with many of the finds being too expensive to develop on a standalone basis.

This has led the NOD to call for cooperation between E&P companies on knowledge-sharing, appropriate technologies and standardization.

“By taking a portfolio-wide approach and developing common solutions, we can reduce costs and accelerate technology development," said Kjetil Hove, Equinor’s EVP for Exploration & Production Norway. “This can make more of these discoveries commercially viable. The benefits will be shared by license owners and society alike.”

The collaboration between Aker BP and Equinor will cover tight reservoir prospects, discoveries and projects across the NCS.

Each party will assign opportunities from their respective portfolios. Together they will assess where technology development, standardization and sharing of experience could deliver the best potential.

The collaboration extends to resource maturation and well stimulation solutions, with a longer-term goal of developing a sustained level of activity to attract the supplier capacity required to develop more tight reservoir discoveries.

A joint steering structure will oversee these pursuits, supported by multi-disciplinary working groups with representatives from both companies.

“By considering opportunities across both portfolios, we can create the basis for increased activity, faster learning and lower costs," said Aker BP CEO Karl Johnny Hersvik. “Together, we can develop solutions more quickly and deploy them at a larger scale. We are starting this work immediately.”

Converting legacy well data for the AI era

Under another new initiative, originated by the collaborative industry forum FORCE, the NOD’s Diskos service has converted about 92,000 well documents from a PDF format to structured files that can be read by artificial intelligence (AI).

“This means that the content is searchable, and it can be analyzed and used in various AI tools," said Louis Vos, assistant director for Data and Facts. “This can save the industry time and money and provide considerably better analyses."

It represents the first phase of a program to make Norwegian subsurface data available for AI, analysis tools and digital assistants.

Using structured information, the NOD explained, would enable E&P companies to work directly with data from documents including geological information, reservoir properties, drilling events, core analyses, liquid properties and test results.

Diskos holds large volumes of raw seismic, production and well data that have proven hard for modern digital tools and automated analyses to access in PDF files.

The new process has standardized the data and converted unstructured information into an organized and useful format for future application of AI, machine learning and advanced data analysis, the NOD said.

Once this work is completed next year, several hundred thousand PDF and TIFF files with reports, logs and other documents will have been converted into JSON files. The structured results should help establish better connections between wells, fields, production licenses, seismic surveys, reports, samples and interpretations.

"This means that Diskos will transition from storing documents and data and providing access to files, to providing knowledge, supporting decisions and enabling automation,” Vos said.