Pittsburgh Petroleum Section

Young Professionals - Happy Hour

SPE Pittsburgh Young Professionals are delighted to invite you to the monthly networking event. Looking forward to meeting you and please feel free to forward this invitation to whomever you think might be interested! Are you or your company interested in sponsoring an upcoming Young Professionals event? If so, please contact our Sponsorship Chair, Fletcher Loder at Fletcher.Loder@gmail.com , for more information.

Contact Information

Distinguished Lecture: Stop, Drop, & Circulate, An Engineered Approach to Coiled Tubing Intervention

Stop, Drop And Circulate, An Engineered Approach To Coiled Tubing Intervention in Horizontal Wells Speaker: Charles Pope, Devon Energy       Abstract: In North America, the average cost of a coiled tubing intervention is $250,000. Experience shows that 30% of the wells will have cost overruns of more than $500,000. Additionally, 1 well in 16 has a stuck pipe event and consequently, the costs escalates to an average of $1.7 million per well. This talk will share how and where coiled tubing is used around the world. Historical practices are reviewed and the issues associated with them. Also, the need for engineering involvement to improve the coiled tubing intervention will be . This includes a road map for expected drag, detailed time modeling, fluid system planning and data capture. Planned short trips have been eliminated.  Low viscosity fluids are used to provide superior hole cleaning. When overpull is observed, operators should stop pulling out of the hole, drop down, and circulate until the debris is removed.   This engineered solution has been performed on over 75 coiled tubing interventons. These procedural improvements reduced time on location by 50%, reduced cost by 50% and prevented any stuck pipe. One take away: old, historical practices are not your friend in preventing stuck pipe. The solution: stop, drop and circulate. Biography: Charles Pope is the Completions Technology Supervisor at Devon Energy, where he leads a team focused on optimizing coiled tubing interventions. Charles has spent more than 35 years working on completions. He completed the first horizontal well in the Austin Chalk in the late 1980’s. Charles serves on the SPE ATCE Well Completions Committee and SPE Workshop: Application of Integrated Diagnostics for Unconventional Resource Development Committee.  He has authored multiple technical papers. Prior to joining Devon, he held various positions with Sun, XTO Energy and Pinnacle Technology. Charles has a Bachelor of Science in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Oklahoma.

Contact Information

3rd Annual Pints & Posters Event

Please come join us at Federal Galley on the North Shore of Pittsburgh :  Thursday, April 25 th from 5:00 – 9:00PM for our annual Pints and Posters Event.  Students (Bachelors, Masters, PhD) from Penn State, Saint Francis, and Slippery Rock will be presenting posters of their research from their coursework and internships.  This will be an excellent time for students and industry professionals to network in a great atmosphere as we approach the end of the school year. Thanks to all of the amazing support throughout last year as we are able to award 1 st place with a $1,500 scholarship and trophy; 2 nd place with a $1,000 scholarship and ribbon; and 3 rd place with a $500 scholarship and ribbon.   This year we will also be hosting keynote speaker TBD.  We will also host a diverse panel called “How to Succeed Early in Oil and Gas” which will feature top industry professionals from service and operating companies.  We will be relying on all present to judge and award these deserving students with these massive scholarship prizes, so please make every effort to attend!  The ticket price includes heavy appetizers and an open bar.  A huge thanks to Deep Well Services and Tenaris for sponsoring this event! Please find the tentative agenda below : 5:00 to 6:30PM – Networking, Appetizers, Drinks, Students Present their Posters 6:30 to 7:00PM – Keynote Speaker TBD 7:00 to 8:15PM – “How to Succeed Early in Oil and Gas” Panel will feature a wide-range of industry professionals across the Appalachian Basin.  Key topics with Q&A will include: transition from college to workforce; how to interact in the professional world; benefits of starting off early in the field; conventional vs. unconventional fields; and much more!  8:15 to 9:00PM – We will present winners of the Pints & Posters Competition, as well as present SPE Pittsburgh Section scholarship recipients 

Contact Information

Monthly Meeting: Innovative Approaches- Machine Learning, Frac Hits & Unconventional EOR

There has been a significant amount of progress made applying data science techniques in the oil and gas industry over the last few years. These applications have occurred in all aspects of upstream, midstream and downstream sectors, but it is perhaps fair to say that direct application to reservoir centric challenges has not enjoyed as much success as when it has been applied to aspects of the value chain that experience direct observation and measurement by operators (e.g. optimization of facilities). Reservoirs, by their nature, introduce vast degrees of uncertainty    due to their imperfect characterization, and sporadic and low-density sampling. Here we touch on several reservoir workflows incorporating data science and dive deep in to specific example involving frac hit mitigation.   Frac hits are a form of fracture-driven interference (FDI) that occur when newly drilled wells communicate with existing wells during completion, and which may negatively or positively affect production. An analytics and machine-learning approach is presented to characterize and aid understanding of the root causes of frac hits. The approach was applied to a field data set and indicated that frac hits can be quantitatively attributed to operational or subsurface parameters such as spacing or depletion. The novel approach analyzed a 10-well pad comprising two ‘parent’ producers and eight ‘child’ infills. The analysis included the following data types: microseismic, completion, surface and bottomhole pressure, tracers, production, and petrophysical logs. The method followed a three-step process: 1) use analytics to assess interference during the hydraulic fracturing and during production, 2) catalogue or extract feature engineering attributes for each stage (offset distance, petrophysics, completion, and depletion) and 3) apply machine-learning techniques to identify which attributes (operations or subsurface) are significant in the causation and/or enhancement of inter-well communication. Information fusion with multi-modal data was also used to determine the probability of well-to-well communication. The data fusion technique integrated multiple sensor data to obtain a lower detection error probability and a higher reliability by using data from multiple sources. The results showed that the infill wells completed in closest proximity to the depleted parents exhibit strong communication. The machine-learning classification creates rules that enable better understanding of control variables to improve operational efficiency. Furthermore, the methodology lends a framework that enables the development of visualization, continuous learning, and real-time application to mitigate communication during completions. Hayley Stephenson, BHGE Energy Innovation Center, Reservoir Analytics Engineer : Hayley is a reservoir analytics engineer at the BHGE Energy Innovation Center. Her experience is in large scale data analytics and algorithm development, with an emphasis in reservoir data. Since joining BHGE in 2016, Hayley has had the opportunity to rotate between product lines and technology development, gaining experience in new product innovation, statistical analysis, and reservoir analytics development. These opportunities have led her to her current role where she works with geoscientists and digital experts to turn technical requirements into functional prototype algorithms, providing optimized solutions to customer problems. Hayley holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Oklahoma Christian University and is currently pursuing her M.S. at Georgia Tech. Ali Shahkarami, BHGE Energy Innovation Center, Reservoir Analytics Lead: Ali is a senior engineer and Reservoir Analytics Lead at the BHGE Energy Innovation Center (EIC). At BHGE EIC he leads the strategic direction and execution of the reservoir analytics program. Ali has broad experience in reservoir engineering and data-driven analytics. He is proficient in application of numerical modeling tools, machine learning, and data mining techniques to solve petroleum engineering problems. Before joining BHGE, he worked as an Assistant Professor of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering at Saint Francis University in Loretto Pennsylvania, where he started a new Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering undergraduate level program.

Contact Information