Innovation for the energy transition
Welcome to this edition of Halliburton Subsurface Insights, prepared for delegates at the Asia Petroleum Geoscience Conference and Exhibition 2024.
As the energy transition progresses, the demand for better and more efficient subsurface characterization continues to grow. For instance, the key challenge associated with finding advantaged hydrocarbons, sites for the geological storage of CO2, locating subsurface hydrogen and critical minerals, or a host of other geoengineering projects, is creating workflows that utilize whatever subsurface data is available and interpolating between them using geological context. This will be an important step towards understanding the plausibility of outcomes. At Halliburton Landmark, we are pleased to be rising to this challenge and herein you will find some highlights of our approach.
Scalable Earth Modeling, a DecisionSpace® 365 cloud application is a key innovation that helps enable a flexible, grid-less approach to creating static models of the subsurface at interchangeable scales. Moreover, model creation can be rapid, helping allow the user to move away from a single “truth” model, to explore the range of inherent uncertainty. Our ambition is to ensure that all models created contain plausible geological trends (e.g., heterogeneity) in three-dimensions.
Better subsurface modeling will be key to identification of advantaged hydrocarbons – those that are not only economically robust, but also have a low carbon intensity of emissions associated with their production. Hydrocarbons will remain a substantial part of the energy supply mix for several more decades, so it is important to focus on those that have the lowest carbon intensity from the onset of their exploitation.
Recent deep-water gas discoveries in the North Sumatra Basin of Indonesia are a significant milestone in the region’s long history of hydrocarbon exploration. Exploration efforts are expected to continue expanding into other parts of Indonesia and the wider South and Southeast Asian region. For example, the overlooked Bay of Bengal might get a breath of new life after the announcement of the 2024 Bangladesh offshore bid round, the first since 2012. Geological context, subsurface characterization, and fairway mapping innovations will be key drivers of success in the quest for new advantaged hydrocarbon resources and maximizing asset value.
Moreover, in parallel, it will be vital to sequester CO2 in geological storage sites. Whilst depleted hydrocarbon fields have potential, the largest volumes can be stored in saline aquifers. It is, thus, important to screen for the most suitable saline aquifers in any basin/region. We have developed a rapid cloud-hosted screening tool helping to do just that, using technology first developed for traditional play fairway screening. Rock units can be high-graded in terms of their prospective storage resource, and the highest ranked parts of the storage fairway identified.
Subsequent work can then focus on the flow dynamics of the CO2 in the storage unit. One of Halliburton Landmark’s applicable tools is the Permedia® CO2 Toolkit created to help address the issues of plume migration, injectivity, and long-term storage. Unlike similar tools that are adapted from traditional hydrocarbon migration modeling and use Darcy flow modelling, Permedia CO2 Toolkit is purpose-built and uses innovative invasion percolation modeling, that is much more suitable for helping to model the flow of a supercritical fluid such as CO2 in the subsurface.
We hope you will enjoy reading about these innovations. You will also be able to find out more at the Halliburton conference booth in the exhibition hall. Please reach out to us if you would like to know more. Enjoy the conference!
