D. Nathan Meehan - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by D. Nathan Meehan
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Sep 1, 2015
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Aug 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Feb 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, May 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Jun 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Apr 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Nov 1, 2015
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
The way ahead, Feb 1, 2016
SPE President's Column The English punk rock band, The Clash, posed this question... more SPE President's Column The English punk rock band, The Clash, posed this question musically in 1982. It is unlikely they intended it as a starting point for a discussion on careers in petroleum engineering. Yet, this was the topic of a SPE young professionals (YPs) meeting at the Asia Pacific Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition I attended where, like everywhere else, YPs were concerned about the downturn in oil and gas prices and the resulting impact on their career choices. Interestingly, the title of the session was “Ridin the Storm Out,” another 1980s hit by REO Speedwagon. This title implies a temporary drop in the industry, perhaps like the 2008 Asian financial crisis. In that “storm,” oil prices dropped from more than USD 140/bbl to less than USD 40/bbl; North American rig count dropped from more than 2,000 to fewer than 900. Mapping rig activity over industry downturns since 1998 shows that the three prior storms were all relatively brief. In each of these downturns, rig activity in the US reached 80% of its prior peak activity within 2 years of the fall. Until late August last year, the current downturn had more or less tracked the previous decline in 2008. Will we recover in 2–3 years as in prior downturns, or will this be like the 1980s? What does that portend for young engineers in our industry? I do not have a magic ball, but I can share some statistics and thoughts. During the 1980s, rig count dropped from a peak of 4,469 active rigs in November 1981 to 686 rigs in June 1986. The US rig count stayed below 1,300 from 1 March 1986 to 1 February 2005, reaching a low point of 502 rigs in February 1999. This marked the lowest rig count since Baker Hughes began reporting rig counts in the 1940s. This was not a storm. It was an ice age. Here are a few questions you are probably pondering. Will there be jobs available? What will it be like to work in an environment of constant focus on costs and efficiency? Is this the industry in which I want to spend my career? Wherever I go, students and professionals share this concern.
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Mar 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Dec 1, 2015
What constitutes a perfect day? It depends. To a surfer, it is a day of warm sunshine and perfect... more What constitutes a perfect day? It depends. To a surfer, it is a day of warm sunshine and perfect waves. To sports fans, perhaps a great win by their favorite team. We each have our own idea of what makes a perfect day. Another aspect of a perfect day may not be a conscious thought but is of utmost importance: arriving home safely at the end of the day. Last month, I wrote about how the Society of Petroleum Engineers' (SPE) mission statement reflects the role of the Society and its members in serving the public benefit. This month, let us discuss how we are going beyond statements to actions to improve people's lives by not only enabling affordable energy, but also by doing it in the healthiest, safest, and most environmentally responsible way possible.
Carbon Intensity of Unconventional and Latin American Oil Plays
Carbon intensity (CI) of oil and gas production varies widely across global oil plays. Life cycle... more Carbon intensity (CI) of oil and gas production varies widely across global oil plays. Life cycle extraction in the Latin American Region (LAR) has some of the highest and lowest values of CI and holds many opportunities to reduce carbon emissions and improve national wealth. Flaring and venting of associated or non-associated natural gas dramatically increases CI. This paper applies peer-reviewed processes across broad averages of oil and gas activity in major fields around the world and compares them with both Latin American and North American oil plays. Ways to lower the carbon intensity for high CI fields in the region are discussed. Unique opportunities exist to minimize carbon intensity in both areas. We perform well-to-refinery calculations of CI for major unconventional oil plays in all major Latin American fields, the largest North American unconventional plays and other major producing countries. This approach accounts for emissions from exploration, drilling & completions, production, processing, and transportation. The analysis tool is an open-source engineering-based model called Oil Production Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimator (OPGEE). OPGEE makes estimates of emissions accounting using up to 50 parameters for each modeled field. This model was developed at Stanford University. Data sources include government sources, technical papers, satellite observations, and commercial databases. Applied globally, OPGEE estimates show the highest values in areas with extensive flaring of natural gas and very heavy crude oils. Heavy oils require large energy inputs (e.g. steam flooding) and/or the use of light hydrocarbon diluents for transportation offset. OPGEE can be used to evaluate the CI impacts of public policy actions. While both NA unconventional and LAR crudes will remain vital to regional and global supplies, unconventional production, especially from light tight oil is the most significant new source of fossil fuels in the last decade. Under a wide variety of carbon constraints, oil usage will continue for many decades and increase in the near term. Operators, governments and regulators need to be able to avoid "locking in" development of suboptimal resources and providing incentives for shale operators to manage resources sustainably. Oil producers must prepare by refraining from developing marginal projects, eliminating flaring, optimizing hydraulic fracture treatments, using improved recovery methods (e.g. enhanced oil recovery using anthropogenic CO2), reducing energy use, and eliminating unnecessary gas waste.
International journal of comparative and applied criminal justice, Mar 1, 2009
Water Influx
Elsevier eBooks, 2012
Publisher Summary This chapter provides the various water influx calculation models and a detaile... more Publisher Summary This chapter provides the various water influx calculation models and a detailed description of the computational steps involved in applying these models. Active water drive reservoirs are typically characterized by a gradual and slow reservoir pressure decline. It is suggested that if during any long period the production rate and reservoir pressure remain reasonably constant, the reservoir voidage rate must be equal to the water influx rate. The simplest model that can be used to estimate the water influx into a gas or oil reservoir is based on the basic definition of compressibility. When an oil well is brought on production at a constant flow rate after a shut-in period, the pressure behavior is essentially controlled by the transient flowing condition. It is found that the Carter and Tracy water influx model does not require superposition and allows direct calculation of water influx. The primary difference between the Carter and Tracy technique and the van Everdingen and Hurst technique is that Carter and Tracy technique assumes constant water influx rates over each finite time interval.
What industry leaders expect in 2011
Unconventional Reserves and Resources Accounting and Booking
Performance of Oil Reservoirs
Elsevier eBooks, 2012
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses various primary recovery mechanisms and their effects on... more Publisher Summary This chapter discusses various primary recovery mechanisms and their effects on the overall performance of oil reservoirs. The basic principles of the material balance equation and other governing relationships that can be used to predict the volumetric performance of oil reservoirs are presented. The driving mechanisms that provide the natural energy necessary for oil recovery includes rock and liquid expansion drive, depletion drive, gas cap drive, water drive, and gravity drainage drive. A depletion drive reservoir is characterized by a rapidly increasing gas and oil ratio from all wells, regardless of their structural position. Oil recovery by gas cap expansion is a frontal drive displacing mechanism, which yields considerably larger recovery efficiency than that of depletion drive reservoirs. The mechanism of gravity drainage occurs in petroleum reservoirs as a result of differences in densities of the reservoir fluids. The material balance equation which is one of the basic tools of reservoir engineers for interpreting and predicting reservoir performance is also analyzed.
Professionalism and Ethics
Elsevier eBooks, 2012
Soc. Pet. Eng. AIME, Pap.; (United States), Oct 1, 1983
Recompletion decisions at Stratton field historically have been complicated by the presence of ma... more Recompletion decisions at Stratton field historically have been complicated by the presence of many thin sand lenses of widely varying pay qUality. The advent of a cased-hole formation evaluation tool-the dual detector pulsed neutron log (DDPN)-has simplified matters greatly by revealing current, detailed information about reservoir rock properties and fluid saturations. By using 4 years of recompletion data, DDPN log characteristics and logderived parameters have been identified and used successfully to distinguish between gas-, oil-, and waterbearing zones, to predict when fracture stimulations will be required to produce at commercial gas rates, to identify depleted gas zones, and to rank potential recompletion zones according to their respective absolute open-flow potentials (OFP's).
Correlation for water viscosity
Pet. Eng. Int.; (United States), Jul 1, 1980
Estimates of the dynamic viscosity of water are required in various reservoir and production engi... more Estimates of the dynamic viscosity of water are required in various reservoir and production engineering problems. A graph is presented to depict the effects of pressure and water salinity on water viscosity under reservoir conditions. An approximate correlation for the graph also is given which relates the estimated maximum error for both the viscosity and pressure correction factors at given temperatures.
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Sep 1, 2015
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Aug 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Feb 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, May 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Jun 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Apr 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Nov 1, 2015
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
The way ahead, Feb 1, 2016
SPE President's Column The English punk rock band, The Clash, posed this question... more SPE President's Column The English punk rock band, The Clash, posed this question musically in 1982. It is unlikely they intended it as a starting point for a discussion on careers in petroleum engineering. Yet, this was the topic of a SPE young professionals (YPs) meeting at the Asia Pacific Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition I attended where, like everywhere else, YPs were concerned about the downturn in oil and gas prices and the resulting impact on their career choices. Interestingly, the title of the session was “Ridin the Storm Out,” another 1980s hit by REO Speedwagon. This title implies a temporary drop in the industry, perhaps like the 2008 Asian financial crisis. In that “storm,” oil prices dropped from more than USD 140/bbl to less than USD 40/bbl; North American rig count dropped from more than 2,000 to fewer than 900. Mapping rig activity over industry downturns since 1998 shows that the three prior storms were all relatively brief. In each of these downturns, rig activity in the US reached 80% of its prior peak activity within 2 years of the fall. Until late August last year, the current downturn had more or less tracked the previous decline in 2008. Will we recover in 2–3 years as in prior downturns, or will this be like the 1980s? What does that portend for young engineers in our industry? I do not have a magic ball, but I can share some statistics and thoughts. During the 1980s, rig count dropped from a peak of 4,469 active rigs in November 1981 to 686 rigs in June 1986. The US rig count stayed below 1,300 from 1 March 1986 to 1 February 2005, reaching a low point of 502 rigs in February 1999. This marked the lowest rig count since Baker Hughes began reporting rig counts in the 1940s. This was not a storm. It was an ice age. Here are a few questions you are probably pondering. Will there be jobs available? What will it be like to work in an environment of constant focus on costs and efficiency? Is this the industry in which I want to spend my career? Wherever I go, students and professionals share this concern.
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Mar 1, 2016
Journal of Petroleum Technology, Dec 1, 2015
What constitutes a perfect day? It depends. To a surfer, it is a day of warm sunshine and perfect... more What constitutes a perfect day? It depends. To a surfer, it is a day of warm sunshine and perfect waves. To sports fans, perhaps a great win by their favorite team. We each have our own idea of what makes a perfect day. Another aspect of a perfect day may not be a conscious thought but is of utmost importance: arriving home safely at the end of the day. Last month, I wrote about how the Society of Petroleum Engineers' (SPE) mission statement reflects the role of the Society and its members in serving the public benefit. This month, let us discuss how we are going beyond statements to actions to improve people's lives by not only enabling affordable energy, but also by doing it in the healthiest, safest, and most environmentally responsible way possible.
Carbon Intensity of Unconventional and Latin American Oil Plays
Carbon intensity (CI) of oil and gas production varies widely across global oil plays. Life cycle... more Carbon intensity (CI) of oil and gas production varies widely across global oil plays. Life cycle extraction in the Latin American Region (LAR) has some of the highest and lowest values of CI and holds many opportunities to reduce carbon emissions and improve national wealth. Flaring and venting of associated or non-associated natural gas dramatically increases CI. This paper applies peer-reviewed processes across broad averages of oil and gas activity in major fields around the world and compares them with both Latin American and North American oil plays. Ways to lower the carbon intensity for high CI fields in the region are discussed. Unique opportunities exist to minimize carbon intensity in both areas. We perform well-to-refinery calculations of CI for major unconventional oil plays in all major Latin American fields, the largest North American unconventional plays and other major producing countries. This approach accounts for emissions from exploration, drilling & completions, production, processing, and transportation. The analysis tool is an open-source engineering-based model called Oil Production Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimator (OPGEE). OPGEE makes estimates of emissions accounting using up to 50 parameters for each modeled field. This model was developed at Stanford University. Data sources include government sources, technical papers, satellite observations, and commercial databases. Applied globally, OPGEE estimates show the highest values in areas with extensive flaring of natural gas and very heavy crude oils. Heavy oils require large energy inputs (e.g. steam flooding) and/or the use of light hydrocarbon diluents for transportation offset. OPGEE can be used to evaluate the CI impacts of public policy actions. While both NA unconventional and LAR crudes will remain vital to regional and global supplies, unconventional production, especially from light tight oil is the most significant new source of fossil fuels in the last decade. Under a wide variety of carbon constraints, oil usage will continue for many decades and increase in the near term. Operators, governments and regulators need to be able to avoid "locking in" development of suboptimal resources and providing incentives for shale operators to manage resources sustainably. Oil producers must prepare by refraining from developing marginal projects, eliminating flaring, optimizing hydraulic fracture treatments, using improved recovery methods (e.g. enhanced oil recovery using anthropogenic CO2), reducing energy use, and eliminating unnecessary gas waste.
International journal of comparative and applied criminal justice, Mar 1, 2009
Water Influx
Elsevier eBooks, 2012
Publisher Summary This chapter provides the various water influx calculation models and a detaile... more Publisher Summary This chapter provides the various water influx calculation models and a detailed description of the computational steps involved in applying these models. Active water drive reservoirs are typically characterized by a gradual and slow reservoir pressure decline. It is suggested that if during any long period the production rate and reservoir pressure remain reasonably constant, the reservoir voidage rate must be equal to the water influx rate. The simplest model that can be used to estimate the water influx into a gas or oil reservoir is based on the basic definition of compressibility. When an oil well is brought on production at a constant flow rate after a shut-in period, the pressure behavior is essentially controlled by the transient flowing condition. It is found that the Carter and Tracy water influx model does not require superposition and allows direct calculation of water influx. The primary difference between the Carter and Tracy technique and the van Everdingen and Hurst technique is that Carter and Tracy technique assumes constant water influx rates over each finite time interval.
What industry leaders expect in 2011
Unconventional Reserves and Resources Accounting and Booking
Performance of Oil Reservoirs
Elsevier eBooks, 2012
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses various primary recovery mechanisms and their effects on... more Publisher Summary This chapter discusses various primary recovery mechanisms and their effects on the overall performance of oil reservoirs. The basic principles of the material balance equation and other governing relationships that can be used to predict the volumetric performance of oil reservoirs are presented. The driving mechanisms that provide the natural energy necessary for oil recovery includes rock and liquid expansion drive, depletion drive, gas cap drive, water drive, and gravity drainage drive. A depletion drive reservoir is characterized by a rapidly increasing gas and oil ratio from all wells, regardless of their structural position. Oil recovery by gas cap expansion is a frontal drive displacing mechanism, which yields considerably larger recovery efficiency than that of depletion drive reservoirs. The mechanism of gravity drainage occurs in petroleum reservoirs as a result of differences in densities of the reservoir fluids. The material balance equation which is one of the basic tools of reservoir engineers for interpreting and predicting reservoir performance is also analyzed.
Professionalism and Ethics
Elsevier eBooks, 2012
Soc. Pet. Eng. AIME, Pap.; (United States), Oct 1, 1983
Recompletion decisions at Stratton field historically have been complicated by the presence of ma... more Recompletion decisions at Stratton field historically have been complicated by the presence of many thin sand lenses of widely varying pay qUality. The advent of a cased-hole formation evaluation tool-the dual detector pulsed neutron log (DDPN)-has simplified matters greatly by revealing current, detailed information about reservoir rock properties and fluid saturations. By using 4 years of recompletion data, DDPN log characteristics and logderived parameters have been identified and used successfully to distinguish between gas-, oil-, and waterbearing zones, to predict when fracture stimulations will be required to produce at commercial gas rates, to identify depleted gas zones, and to rank potential recompletion zones according to their respective absolute open-flow potentials (OFP's).
Correlation for water viscosity
Pet. Eng. Int.; (United States), Jul 1, 1980
Estimates of the dynamic viscosity of water are required in various reservoir and production engi... more Estimates of the dynamic viscosity of water are required in various reservoir and production engineering problems. A graph is presented to depict the effects of pressure and water salinity on water viscosity under reservoir conditions. An approximate correlation for the graph also is given which relates the estimated maximum error for both the viscosity and pressure correction factors at given temperatures.