While Henry Ford did not invent the moving assembly line—we can thank the meat packing industry for that—he did do a little early day tech transfer when he applied the idea to speed up the mass production of automobiles. The Ford Motor Co. in 2012 celebrated the completion of its 350 millionth car since the company was founded in 1903. Countless applications of the moving assembly line have been deployed in the century since Ford set the idea in motion and revolutionized the industrial manufacturing process.

It is a slightly modified process that brought some sense of order to E&P’s rough and tumble world of making hole and then producing value from it. The shale gale transformed the rig floor into the “factory floor,” where technology has helped transform the drilling process into one that can reliably replicate tasks and production in a systematic way.

The transformation hasn’t stopped there. During a press briefing at this year’s Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) held in Houston, BP demonstrated the myriad ways that technologies from other industries have been gradually adopted by the oil and gas community as key enablers to its success in areas like EOR.

“EOR is doing anything beyond classical reservoir engineering or classical oilfield technologies to increase recovery. It is more than just pressure depletion; it’s using technologies that get more out of the ground,” said John Peak, vice president of BP’s EOR Flagship technology program.

To accomplish that goal, he noted that the company concentrates its efforts on “at-scale, cost-effective technologies” with great success. Peak cited the company’s Ula platform in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea as one example of this success, “with nearly 100% of [oil] production associated with our [Designer] gas EOR system.”

Before new EOR technologies are deployed in the field, they undergo rigorous testing in the company’s laboratory outside of London. There, core samples are subjected to coreflooding. Recently a new robotic system was created; it combined automated testing techniques in the pharmaceutical industry with BP's expertise in coreflooding. The Automated Coreflooding System is the world’s first robotic coreflooding system and “enables multiple core floods to be conducted 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Peak said.

The system allows more rapid screening and optimization of EOR technologies by enabling hundreds of tests to be performed each year rather than dozens as in the past, the company said in a release. It is viewed as a key tool to help achieve the goal of reducing development and testing time by at least 50%.

The robotic coreflooding system is operated by the same team that developed LoSal EOR, the company’s reduced salinity waterflooding technology. More than 45 coreflood tests were performed in validating the LoSal EOR effect before field trials in Alaska, the release said.

Step-by-step, station-by-station, the modification and application of Ford’s idea of mass manufacture has helped many industries, including the one that literally provides the fuel to keep Mr. Ford’s cars moving on down the road.

Comments