Substantial hydrocarbon volumes have been and will continue to be produced from carbonate formations, which hold nearly half of the world's reserves. Because these formations are highly soluble in acid, matrix acid stimulation provides a cost-effective means to enhance well productivity. Effective acid stimulation can be critical to achieving the desired long-term production rates from targeted reservoir layers.

The active listening of passive seismic events in a reservoir, also known as microseismic monitoring, has demonstrated value for operators in various onshore applications, including monitoring hydraulic fracture stimulations, steam injection tracking for bitumen mobilization, and CO2 injection for tertiary oil recovery. Now, geophysical services provider Microseismic, Inc. (MSI) is ready to move the technology offshore, as an event-detection and accident-prevention tool.

In their quest to extract hydrocarbons from unconventional rock sources, oil and gas operators are being forced to employ increasingly unconventional stimulation techniques. One such technique based on a nanofluid technology promises accelerated hydrocarbon recovery from tight formations, as well as additional performance improvements that extend a reservoir's productive life.

Parque das Conchas is an ultradeepwater heavy-oil development in the northern Campos basin offshore Brazil. The project is a joint venture between Shell, Petrobras, and Oil and Natural Gas Corporation of India. The first phase of the project is the development of three independent subsea fields tied back to the centrally located turret-moored floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) host facility, the FPSO Espirito Santo.

Up to 40% of the world's oil wells are shut in, or operating with dispensation, because of well-integrity problems. With the proportion that large, these wells collectively represent major potential for increasing production to meet oil demand—growing globally each year by 1 million BOPD—if improved and more-economic remedies for these problems can be found. Better remedies can reduce the need to drill new wells.