Offshore staff
ABERDEEN, UK – The Oil and Gas Innovation Centre (OGIC) has provided funds totaling more than £1.3 million ($1.71 million) for collaborative projects between oil and gas companies and academics in Scottish universities.
So far OGIC gas has helped facilitate collaborations involving 41 organizations within the oil and gas industry.
The latest, between Varel UK and the University of Aberdeen, is the Resonance Enhanced Drilling (RED) project, which will entail design and development of a new drillbit addressing the challenges of drilling in RED mode.
Jason Marchant, Varel UK District Manager North Sea, said: “There is a need to develop a new faster, cheaper way of drilling new offshore frontier fields that contain sections with chert or fractured granite/ conglomerates.
“The current methods with fixed cutter bits usually lead to uncontrolled energy distribution in these rock types leading to multiple and slow bit runs, or risks of roller cone bit bearing failures and lost-time fishing cones.
“Together with OGIC and the University of Aberdeen, we’ve been examining a new concept that will ultimately result in the creation of a new hybrid drillbit with duel cutting mechanisms that will help overcome the challenges and result in a much more efficient and economical drilling process.”
OGIC has also helped initiate a research partnership between GLINCS and Heriot-Watt University to develop Time Resolved Fluorescence (TRF) technology for scale inhibitors for deployment in production wells.
The project will address challenges relating to sampling and testing, typically a labor- intensive, high-cost, and time-consuming process.
The new TRF technology should allow sampling and testing to be deployed offshore in real time, allowing for increased analyses and a greater source of data to improve understanding of the real-time anti-scale deposition treatment needs.
Arthur Marais, CEO of GLINCS, commented: “Scale inhibitors have been extensively used in oil and gas recovery to prevent scale deposition, but our TRF method represents a break from existing analysis technologies. Not only can it be used to detect concentrations at sub part-per-million values, but it can also be used for multi-detection of different chemistries, and, more importantly, it is suitable for offshore application.
“The collaborative project with OGIC and Heriot-Watt University will enable us to conduct essential comparative experiments to qualify the TRF technique for scale inhibitor analysis.”
07/27/2017
