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‘Smart Drilling’ Fueling U.S. Oil and Gas Boom
The surge in U.S. oil and gas production in recent years is commonly attributed to improvements in hydraulic fracturing — fracking — in shale fields around the nation.
But much of the credit should also go to advances in computer technology and fiber optics, which support the “smart drilling” that makes the search for oil and gas deposits much more accurate.
In the past five years, technology has improved the productivity of the typical oil or gas rig on U.S. shale fields by 200 to 300 percent, Forbes.com reported.
In just two years, oil production has risen five times as fast as wind power and 200 times as fast as solar.
Globally, the cost to find and yield a new barrel of oil has risen from $6 a barrel in 1998 to $27 today. But in U.S. shale fields, the price has dropped to $7 to $15 a barrel.
American oil production will soon surpass Saudi Arabia’s output, according to the International Energy Agency.
“Although horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — fracking — have been widely reported as the reasons for the recent American oil and gas boom, neither of these is explanatory,” Forbes observes.
“In fact, the techniques are decades old. The boom emerged from smart drilling.”
At the core of smart drilling is seismic imaging, which is used to detect oil in the ground. The 3-D imaging benefits greatly from fiber optics, which allows oil companies to record and interpret far more data than previously possible.
Modern computer analysis now quickly computes massive amounts of data that took the first 3-D seismic survey mainframe computer in the early 1970s two years to process.
The end result: U.S. drilling success rates have risen from an average of barely 50 percent in 1972 to over 85 percent today.
