Through its Statoil Innovation subsidiary, Statoil has become the largest shareholder in ResMan, a new company which is developing a smarter way of monitoring fluid flows in oil and gas wells.
Applicable to both new and existing wells, the service concept and its underlying technology will initially be subject to full-scale tests on a Statoil installation.
âWe have great commercial hopes for this product,â says Asle Jostein Hovda, investment manager at Statoil Innovation.
âWeâre in dialogue with operators over large parts of the world, and the response has been huge.â
Using ResManâs intelligent chemical materials offers substantial cost savings by comparison with traditional methods based on wireline deployment of downhole monitoring devices.
A variant of this method is to position measuring instruments permanently in the wells in order to achieve a more continuous picture of the sub-surface environment.
ResMan has been founded in cooperation with the Sintef research foundation and the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technology (IFE).
Statoil Innovation has been the prime mover in bringing these two partners together in a joint investment and commercialisation, and is the largest shareholder with 42 per cent of the shares.
The intelligent chemical materials used are based on polymers, which react with their environment by releasing tracer substances.
The ResMan concept has been patented and is based on installing a permanent downhole monitoring system in hydrocarbon wells.
This involves placing chemical tracer materials in production tubing, sand screens or the actual formation in the near-well area.
That provides reservoir monitoring through intelligent release, data gathering and interpretation of tracer substances.
This in turn can help to determine what is flowing where in the well, to localise gas-, oil- and water-producing zones in the wells, and to provide trend information for further production development and improvement.
ResMan represents Statoil Innovationâs seventh investment since the wholly-owned subsidiary was created in 2001 to commercialise the groupâs technology and expertise through company start-ups.
It also invests in attractive external companies which support Statoilâs technology strategy.