bp as operator of the ACG contract, sees itself as a technology-based company. The ACG developments are underpinned by this expertise and while it has been an investment that builds on tradition, it has also been ahead of its time in technology, transferring industry’s cutting-edge innovations transfer to the Caspian region.
Many of bp’s own new technologies have been successfully applied to ACG’s development operations and projects in Azerbaijan, some of them for the first time in the Caspian.
- Extended reach drilling (ERD) enables well targets to be located in a considerable distance from the platform thereby increasing recovery. The longest ERD well we’ve drilled so far is 6.4km from Chirag. We’re confident that this technology will allow us to maximise recovery from ACG for many decades to come.
- High-angle (near horizontal) drilling technology, which provides the opportunity to complete wells with a large formation thickness thereby increasing the production rates.
- bp Well Advisor ensures safe, reliable and efficient well operations by using real-time information. Its integrated consoles enable to amplify early warning indicators of potential well construction issues, enhancing operational decisions with real-time well surveillance, boosting drilling efficiency, reducing non-productive time. bp Well Advisor was introduced to the Caspian in 2012 when its casing running console became fully operational on all three Azeri platforms and Deepwater Gunashli.
- bp leads the way in what is known as 4D seismic acquisition and it has already been applied to the Caspian. In ACG, 132km of seabed seismic acquisition cables have been installed.
- bp sees Azerbaijan as a major centre of technology expertise in well completions. Completion technology such as open hole gravel packed screens and large diameter tubulars equipped with the fibre-optic allows higher production rates while controlling the amount of sand being produced. Various sand-face completion types like Cased and Perforated (C&P), Stand-alone Screens (SAS), Expandable Sand Screens (ESS), Pre-packed and Open Hole Gravel Packed Screens were installed and piloted at early days of ACG life, before transferring to other bp regions.
Today in ACG the standard completion design for producing wells is the Open Hole Gravel Pack (OHGP). This was a real breakthrough in the early 2000s, and we still find it effective today. Most of the wells are packed with natural proppant while recently non-radioactive tracer proppant has been used. Over the years the OHGP completion technology has undergone significant enhancements. BP’s Azerbaijan business has also looked at potential application of gravel pack completion in cased hole during the up-hole recompletion. The Cased Hole Gravel Packed completion was successfully installed in one East Azeri D06 producer in 2017.
- A number of new technologies deployed at the completion stage changed the way in which the ACG field was developed in the direction of better wells and reservoir performance and lower intervention costs.
- Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS). The first fiber-optical cable was installed in ACG producer in 2004. Restricted wellhead access, high rate, and differential depletion of the different reservoir intervals limited conventional production logging possibilities, etc. justified the decision made on installation of permanent DTS fiber-optical cables in wells for monitoring wells behavior and reservoir performance.
- Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS). Over the past five years this technology has been extensively used for sand monitoring, where outcome contributed to optimizing drawdown to achieve maximum sand free rate and for sand shut-off intervention to isolate identified sand entry zones.
- In-Well Seismic - vertical resolution of surface seismic data suffers from energy loss due to the distance of travel from the source to the reservoir and then back to the surface deployed recording devices. Placing recording instrumentation within the wellbore to record 'one-way' energy improves this. If a permanent fibre is employed within a well, this activity could happen many times thus