Print this pageAAPG GEO 2010 Middle East
Geoscience Conference & Exhibition
Innovative Geoscience Solutions – Meeting Hydrocarbon Demand in Changing Times
March 7-10, 2010 – Manama, Bahrain
A Vision for Future Upstream Technologies
(1) Mehran University of Engg and Tech. Jamshoro, Jamshoro, Pakistan.
This paper presents my vision of the most influential technologies for the next two decades. Unabated global demand for energy will translate into growing demand for traditional hydrocarbon resources. This growing demand represents a significant challenge to which the industry must respond. Several companies have announced ambitious expansion plans for the next several years. However, demand growth is expected to be a long-term phenomenon, for which new technologies must be developed to increase the effectiveness by which hydrocarbon resources are found, developed, and produced.
The paper briefly reviews technologies that I consider the most influential in the past decades, namely 3Dseismic data, horizontal drilling, and geosteering. Each of these technologies has had a profound effect on the industry, emerging from humble beginnings to mainstream applications. Next, I discuss my vision of the potentially most influential future technologies. These technologies include extreme-reservoir-contact wells, smart inflow-control devices, autonomous fields, passive-seismic monitoring, gigacell simulation, smart fluids, bionic wells, and nanorobots. Though most of these are just dreams, significant strides that have been made to achieve them are highlighted.