Industry Challenges

The oil and gas Industry supplies the energy, fuel, and chemical feed stocks needed to keep the world’s economies viable and growing.  Because most of the easily accessible oil and gas has already been found, the industry must find and develop new hydrocarbon resources.  Many times these are in remote and harsh locations in challenging environments, under thousands of feet of water, and buried tens of thousands of feet into the earth where temperatures, pressures, and geomechanical challenges tax the mechanical limits of drilling and production materials. 

Even when these reservoirs can be reached using advanced drilling technology, producing hydrocarbons from these reservoirs at commercially competitive prices is another challenge. Vast hydrocarbon resources in unconventional ultralow permeability shale, carbonates, siltstone, and sandstone formations worldwide are now becoming commercially viable using advanced methods of stimulation.  However, recoveries in these unconventional fields can be very low, in some cases just a few percent.    In addition, seventy percent of our world oil and gas production still comes from mature conventional fields over twenty years old, with over two-thirds of the oil and gas stranded waiting for advanced recovery methods to sweep out the remaining hydrocarbon.

One recent technology that can assist in meeting all of these challenges is the use of downhole expandable solid-steel liner.  This technology can provide additional casing points for drilling and constructing wells in deepwater, HTHP, and pre-salt drilling environments to mitigate risk and attain the desired wellbore ID at depth.  It can be used to enable more recovery from mature fields by well conversion and recompletion, and to enable hydraulic fracturing by restoring wellbores and sealing off perforations.