Equinor, APT Partner Up to Cut Downhole Sampling and Logging Costs

Norwegian oil and gas company Equinor and Applied Petroleum Technology (APT) have partnered up in a research and development project that aims to replace expensive downhole sampling and logging with more cost-efficient solutions.

Helge Nyrønning, CEO of APT said: "How can we extract more relevant information that helps operators find and produce more oil and gas despite having access to fewer data sources? This is the challenge we aim to solve together with Equinor."

According to APT, the oil and gas industry’s drive to reduce both its cost level and climate gas emissions has resulted in continued pressure to reduce the cost and scope of data acquisition programs, and this pressure has created a need for methodologies that provide insight into the character of petroleum fluids in the absence of downhole samples more effectively.

APT and Equinor will cooperate to extract more information from reduced data acquisition programs.

"The joint R&D project will develop pragmatic solutions, using geochemical analysis, to extract the required information from reduced data sets, including enabling operators to replace acquisition programs such as downhole fluid sampling, production logging or wireline logging with more robust and cost-efficient solutions," ATP said.

“Equinor’s ambition is to reduce its group-wide emissions by 50 percent by 2030, and we aim to realize 90 percent of this ambition by absolute reductions. Extracting more data from current sources without having to execute more downhole operations could be one way of reducing both emission levels and operating costs,” says Vibeke Haugen, technology manager at Equinor.

The R&D project involves the development and testing of analytical instrumentation, execution, and verification of experimental technologies and tool deployment and optimization.  

This workflow will allow APT and Equinor to answer fundamental questions related to whether the reservoir phase is oil or gas, the quality of the petroleum in the reservoir and how it varies, and which zone or zones are contributing to production, ATP said.

“The aim is to develop a methodology that allows engineers to deploy geochemical techniques to enhance understanding of hydrocarbon reservoirs using proxies that are less costly and easier to obtain than the downhole samples that have historically been used for exploration, EOR and IOR work,” adds Helge Nyrønning.