Mature Oil: How Technology Helps Sustain Production from Depleted Fields

A young man in a Rosneft overall poured oil just extracted from a well at the Tananykskoye field into a special liter bottle. The sample bottle immediately became warm, as if warm tea had been poured into it, although the color was more like chifir. Part of the oil spilled onto the ground, but it was not easy to see – the local black soil, which was plowed around the well within a radius of 10 m and generously watered with Orenburg rain, hid all traces. This well is one of many owned by Orenburgneft (a subsidiary of Rosneft. – Vedomosti). The company has been mining in the region for 60 years, so the reserves are quite depleted. But production here is not declining and is even growing thanks to new technologies developed by Rosneft’s corporate institutions and its Russian partners.

New technologies help the company at all stages of work in the fields. For example, when building wells, oil companies cannot do without maps. But few people have their own service for storing them in one place and convenient use “in the field.” Therefore, the specialists of TomskNIPIneft and the Sibintek company (part of Rosneft) have developed special software using artificial intelligence, said Alexei Strelnikov, head of the geoinformation support department at Orenburgneft, showing the service interface on the screen. In this service, company employees can upload terrain maps, topographic plans and other cartographic materials they need in their work. With the help of the service, the company managed to reduce the time for collecting and processing information for engineering surveys by 4 times, and the process of determining the preliminary wellhead was reduced from four weeks to one. According to Strelnikov, the number of active users of the service will soon grow from 200 to 4,000, and its mobile version will appear for working in the fields.

With the help of Russian engineers, Orenburgneft has replaced imports of one of the critical technologies – a bit for drilling a well. According to the head of the engineering department of Orenburgneft, Artem Fedyanin, the new equipment is made of special steel instead of tungsten carbide, and the cutters are made of artificial diamond, which can withstand high temperatures in the well. He showed three samples of bits of different diameters from the trunk of his pickup truck: the “lightest” of them – for drilling injection wells – weighs 75 kg, and the largest – for drilling technical columns – 130 kg. To protect against rust, the chisel was covered with golden paint, which shone dully in the light of lightning from a thunderstorm starting over the field.