Abu Dhabi is looking to international oil companies and their engineers for a much-needed boost in technology development and innovation this November when it hosts one of the world's largest petroleum summits. International oil experts can help the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company with everything from implementing sophisticated drilling techniques to reducing the downtime of maintenance cycles to implementing "smart" fields with precise controls and measurement systems, said Ali Rashid al Jarwan, the general manager of the Abu Dhabi Marine Operating Company (Adma-Opco).
The Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference, to be held Nov 3-6, will also be an opportunity to restore confidence in oil markets after record prices and concerns about future supplies, Mr Jarwan said. "There should be more common alignment about the pricing and forecast of oil supply and demand," he said. The country was in a unique position to be hosting the conference, Mr Jarwan said, because it had a long history of working with international oil companies to improve oil and gas production.
Mr Jarwan recited an old expression the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan used in reference to the oil industry, which translates roughly as "have a friend before you start your journey". Unlike other Gulf oil producers, the UAE declined to seize total control of its oil fields amid the wave of resource nationalism that swept through the region in the 1970s. Sheikh Zayed instead opted for long-running production-sharing agreements with a group of international companies that includes Shell, ExxonMobil, the Japan Oil Development Company and a host of other oil majors.
For Adma-Opco, which can produce up to 600,000 barrels per day at its offshore fields, Mr Jarwan hopes the conference will help speed up the implementation what he called the "smart field", which others in the industry refer to as the "digital oil field". In the "smart fields" engineers have access to a huge amount of up to the minute data and centralised controls that allow them to manipulate water injection and carefully control production levels. When Mr Jarwan first started as an engineer for Adnoc, nearly all the data had to be collected with physical instruments at the wellhead.
The technology has been implemented in new operations at Adma-Opco since about 2000, but older fields could use new technology, he said. "In the old fields, there's still a long way to go," he said. Peter Venn, Middle East business development director for SAS, which sells statistical analysis software used in digital oil fields around the region, has estimated greater use of technology could improve efficiency levels by three to five per cent.
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