Technology
British Borneo recognizes the added-value impact of technology to its business competitiveness and sustained growth. We manifest this recognition through our commitment to technology development and investment in infrastructure, projects and competency development.Utilizing technology, efforts are directed towards operating world-class plants and stimulating growth in niche areas of technology leadership. Through technology we can make more efficient use of resources. Technology helps in the creation of new products or, in improving existing products. It is used to better manage and operate plants / facilities and help safeguard the environment and improve safety.
Among the latest technologies we utilise are:
Sea Bed Resistivity Logging
Seabed logging is the first truly independent pre-drilling measurement of reservoir properties since the development of seismic technology early in the last century. It is a proven direct hydrocarbon indicator, which is now playing a key role in addressing the ever-growing challenges of meeting the world’s energy needs, and it has provided the catalyst for a completely new EM service industry.
A ship tows a horizontal electric dipole source close to the seabed to create a large electric field. As the electric field propagates through the subsurface, it is perturbed by any variations in the subsurface resistivity. The electric and magnetic fields are both measured and recorded by highly sensitive units distributed over the seabed. Once sufficient data has been recorded, an acoustic signal is sent to the receivers to trigger a release mechanism, and the recorders return to the surface for data analysis.The recorded data is processed to remove noise, and compensate for environmental variations, such as water depth and background resistivity. In many cases, this data can then be interpreted directly. Increasingly, however, the data is imaged using depth migration or inversion to facilitate easy integration with seismic and other subsurface data.
Most seabed-logging projects have been used to confirm the presence of hydrocarbons in structures identified from seismic data before drilling. This application significantly reduces the drilling risk – especially for operators of expensive deepwater wells.
Over the last few years, an additional application has emerged called EM scanning. Scanning is characterized by the rapid deployment of wide-azimuth sensors in regular, sparse grid-like patterns over large areas. In this application, scanning is used to investigate large regions and detect resistive subsurface formations early in the exploration cycle. This new approach has been shown to accelerate prospect delivery and focus exploration efforts in the areas most likely to contain hydrocarbons. Scanning can even detect unconventional reservoirs that are not always easy to see on seismic data (such as stratigraphic traps). Because scanning is often applied over wide areas before lease sales, it is increasingly thought of as both a proprietary and a multiclient application.
A Sea Bed Resistivity Scan
British Borneo Oil and Gas is committed to use a seabed resistivity scan on the offshore area in Ghana, for which we have signed a MOU to carry out a palinspastic study.Managed Pressure Drilling
According to the International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC), MPD is an adaptive drilling process that is used to control the annular pressure profile more precisely throughout the wellbore. Its objectives are to ascertain the limits of the downhole pressure environment and to manage the annular hydraulic pressure profile accordingly. The benefits of MPD are as follows:
- MPD processes employ a collection of tools and techniques that may mitigate the risks and costs of drilling wells with narrow downhole environmental limits by proactively managing the annular hydraulic pressure profile.
- MPD may increase control of backpressure, fluid density, fluid rheology, annular fluid level, circulating friction and hole geometry, or combinations thereof.
- MPD may allow faster corrective action when dealing with observed pressure variations. This facilitates drilling of what might otherwise be economically unattainable prospects.
- MPD techniques may be used to avoid formation influx, which will be contained safely using an appropriate process.
The main objective is to provide the ability to drill a well with accurate control of the bottomhole pressure (BHP), in order that the operation be conducted with more flexibility and in a proactive way; this is in contrast with the passive mode used in conventional drilling. MPD can be described as the sum of mud weight, equivalent circulation density and casing back pressure. With this in mind, it is easy to see that any one of these components can be modified in order to reach the drilling pressure required for the duration of the drilling process.
Intelligent Wells
A well is called intelligent only if it adds value to the project during its life-cycle. Monitoring of production parameter elements and/or flow control devices are used to determine this.Subsurface monitoring gained popularity in the early 1990s due to an increase in reliability and the improvement of metrological parameters. This has accelerated the development of optical technology, which has been made more robust in order to survive hostile environments such as downhole conditions. British Borneo is committed to investing in the development of optical sensors as well as downhole flow control for moderated service conditions.