JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY www.jptonline.

org

MARCH 2012

M A R C H 2 0 1 2 VO LU M E 6 4 , N U M B E R 3

The Promise of

FIBER OPTIC CABLE

JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY

HYDRAULIC FRACTURING
PRODUCTION OPERATIONS
HEAVY OIL
SEISMIC APPLICATIONS

FEATURES

The Next Opportunity

to Improve
Hydraulic-Fracture
Stimulation
Where Is Innovation
inthe Shale Plays?
Higher Resolution
Subsurface Imaging

A fiber optic strain gauge

is protected in the metal
casing that spirals inside
this grate. Signals from
thousands of points along
that path are assembled
to create a 3D view of the
force of the reservoir on
the bottomhole assembly.

36

FiberOptics.indd 36

JPT MARCH 2012

7/5/12 7:06 AM

FIBER OPTIC SENSING

Learning How It Really Feels Downhole

Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT/JPT Online Staff Writer

agnus McEwen-King describes his companys vision by

saying it is out to build the Earths nervous system.
The company, Qinetiq, has a venture, OptaSense,
which is developing practical ways to use fiber optic cable for
distributed acoustic sensing in oil wells. It is essentially installing a long string of digital microphones in a well. In partnership
with Shell, the former British defense contractor has created
systems that track what is happening during hydraulic fracturing and record sound waves during seismic testing.
Baker Hughes has a partnership with Shell covering the
sense of touch. It is using specially modified fiber optic cable
to measure small changes impacting 40-ft-long sections of a
well in the US Gulf of Mexico deepwater Mars field. The recently
completed injection well has also been wired with fiber optics
gathering temperature, pressure, and sound data.
Shells third venture, with a Dutch company named TNO,
will try to sniff out changes in well chemistry using fiber optic
cables coated with specially formulated gels. The gels are
designed to absorb specific molecules. When the concentration of the target chemical, such as carbon dioxide, increases,
the gel absorbs more of it and swells, which is observed by the
sensitive fiber.
Shells goal is to create permanent monitoring systems
that make intelligent wells smarter by observing conditions
inside a well, meter by meter. Vianney Koelman, chief scientist
and fiber optics program leader at Shell International E&P, said
fiber optics can directly gather information that helps answer
pressing questions, including Is a well producing the way I
think it is producing? Is it working the way the computer model
is telling me? It can be quite different than what you think.
Fiber optic temperature measurement systemsranging from gauges using fiber for measurements in one spot
to fiber doing meter-by-meter measurements throughout a
wellhave been installed in thousands of wells going back to
the mid-1990s. The fastest growth has been in heavy oil fields
where temperature monitoring improves the efficiency of
high-temperature steam injection systems used to coax heavy
oil out of the ground.
There is growing interest in using fiber optic to answer
questions that tools like microseismic or production monitor-

ing cannot fully answer on their own.There is a ton of interest

in acoustics now in the industry, said Glen McColpin, business
development director for long-term monitoring at Pinnacle, a
subsidiary of Halliburton. When I go to SPE shows and tech
forums, there are a lot of presentations in that area. A lot of
vendors are coming out of the woodwork.
Halliburton sees interest from customers of all sizes
in new uses for fiber optics. Shell has made some significant investments in fiber optic sensing, more than most, but I
know there are other integrated oil companies working on it,
K oelman said.
Customers of Halliburton and Weatherford that installed
fiber for acoustic a few years ago, expecting it would someday be useful, are hooking it up and seeing what they can learn
from it.
The current state of acoustic fiber monitoring is like the
early days of personal computers. There is a lot of excitement
about its potential, but it lacks what is known in the electronics business as killer appswidely used applications that
would make monitoring sound and vibration in the well a standard business tool.

Seeking Sound Applications

As for how to profit from advanced fiber optic well monitoring, that is something the industry is still trying to figure out.
When I go to conferences, what people keep talking about
and seeing as the next thing is distributed acoustic sensing,
said Alexis Mendez, president of MCH Engineering, a fiber consulting firm. In distributed acoustic, people are very cagey. It is
very embryonic.
One indication of change is the growing fiber alphabet. There
are distributed temperature sensors (DTS), distributed strain
sensors (DSS), distributed acoustic sensors (DAS), and perhaps
distributed chemical sensors (DCS). Philippe Legrand, product line
manager for fiber optics at Baker Hughes, predicts that multifiber
systems will alter widespread assumptions that are now built into
reservoir models by showing how complex they really are, noting
a reservoir is not uniform. Nature hatesuniformity.
New fiber applications are built on the expanding uses
of temperature sensing. The goal is to create uses spanning

Copyright 2012, Society of Petroleum Engineers. Reprinted from the Journal of Petroleum Technology with permission.
JPT MARCH 2012

FiberOptics.indd 37

37

7/5/12 7:06 AM

Tubes containing fiber optic cable entering a well during

testing by HiFi Engineering, which is using fiber to detect
leaks. Normally only one tube, which can hold multiple fibers,
is used.

The interrogator unit, which interprets light reflected back

from a fiber optic cable. The technology, used by Qinetiq
OptaSense for security monitoring above ground, is being
adapted for well monitoring.

the life of a well, allowing operators to avoid expenses, such

as interventions for production logging. Fiber allows an operator to watch a well over time. A permanent system will record
events missed by periodic logging runs.
It is a dynamic situation, said Tad Bostick, vice president of optical sensing for Weatherford. If you are getting
more continuous types of measurements, it is easier to connect the dots than it would be trying to interpolate two points
that are months or years apart.
Halliburton clients have begun using temperature sensing
to track cement jobs, McColpin said. The chemical reaction dur-

ing hardening generates heat. Companies are using fiber to help

confirm when the cement has cured, which sometimes takes
longer than expected.
A lot of brainstorming is taking place on ways to take advantage of acoustic monitoring, such as using fiber optics to verify that
the actuators on blowout preventers have fired when commanded,
said Alan Turner, an application specialist at Micron Optics.
There are a lot of ideas of what can be done when we
are deploying downhole microphones and noise logging, said
Koelman, who declined to say what is next on Shells fiber optic
development list.

Making a Critical Connection

When a new injection well in the Mars field was completed
last fall, the US Gulf of Mexico field was wired with a bundle of fiber optic cables designed to offer an unprecedented real-time look at what is going on down below. But this
industry-first technology would not have done a bit of good
without a way to connect two pairs of six fiber optic cables
in a well 19,000 ft deep.
Connecting fiber optic cables is exacting work in the
best of circumstances. Each pair of the strandsabout the
thickness of a hairmust make an exact end-to-end connection allowing light to freely travel back and forth to a
monitoring system.
At stake was an installation that cost millions of dollars and represented six years of work by Baker Hughes and
Shell. The wet connect had been tested in similar conditions, but never used to complete a well. The installation
was also a test of a critical technology needed to install
fiber optic monitoring on deepwater wells, where multistage completions are common.
In the first stage completion of the well connected to
Shells Mars platform, the bottomhole assembly with the

38

FiberOptics.indd 38

sand screen and its built-in monitoring system was put in

place and gravel packed.
Then came the really difficult step: joining the upper
and lower sections.
The Baker Hughes downhole wet connect was
designed to protect, and exactly align, the two wired pipes
to mate the six fibers. Pictures of the wet connect do not
show details of the design.
The weeks leading up to that moment were an anxious time for team members worrying whether the wet
connect would work, said Philippe Legrand, product line
manager for fiber optics at Baker Hughes. We were waiting and waiting, he said. When I got that call, I was very,
very happy.
Legrand recalled not only the day it happened, 14
November 2011, but also the time: 10:38 p.m.
It was a first run and it showed it can be done. You
can make that connection, said Rustom Mody, vice president of technology for completions and production at
BakerHughes. It was a major installation. There were a lot
of years of work and investment put into this.

JPT MARCH 2012

7/5/12 7:06 AM

What You Dont Know

A costly risk factor facing operators in the Gulf of Mexico led
Shell to begin developing new technology to make real-time
observations of changes downhole that have damaged deepwater wells, costing operators hundreds of millions of dollars.
The common explanation for some of the losses was reservoir
movement. It was logical to conclude that years of oil production and water injection could cause shifts that could crush or
shear a downhole assembly. Shell started a program to create
a system to directly observe changes in the well.
Monitoring tiny deformations of well tubulars would give
us the ability to predict well integrity problems before they arise.
Fiber optic strain sensing holds the promise of becoming a key
enabling technology in this area, Koelman said. Shell reacted
by seeking out proposals for new ways to detect what could be

causing the failures in hopes of averting them. Baker Hughes

was chosen because it had a way to use fiber to detect how factors such as compression or compaction of a formation impact
a well. That led a development partnership that worked six years
to create a fiber with far more measurement points linked to a
processor able to create visual images of the structural stresses
near a well.
The strain monitoring system installed in the Mars field
sends data from up to 12,000 points along a fiber optic cable
spiraling inside a 40-ft-long cylindrical grate surrounding a
sand screen. The fiber can detect infinitesimal changes due to
compression or expansion caused by physical force or temperature changes. It is one of six fibers inside a 1 /4-in. steel tube
running to the bottom of the well. Others measure temperature
or sound, or are allocated for future use.

Shooting for Better Seismic Imaging by Going Deep with Fiber Optics
After 35 years of work creating seismic images using geophones in wellbores, Bjrn Paulsson is working with fiber
optics to create a system capable of surviving the extreme
conditions found in deep wells.
The biggest technical challenge is building a system
that be deployed to that depth and pressure, said Paulsson, president of Paulsson Inc., which is developing a deepwater system with support from a group of large oil companies and a grant from the Research Partnership to Secure
Energy for America (RPSEA).
The purpose of the effort is to create systems with
geophones using fiber or fiber optic cables able to gather better quality data for improved images in deep wells onshore
or offshore. It could be particularly useful in deepwater reservoirs located beneath thick beds of salt. There are a lot
of these reservoirs producing under expectation, Paulsson
said. The geologic and reservoir models are too simple. They
dont have the data to build more realistic models.
Shell has developed its own permanent seismic array
using fiber optic cable with a different goal in mind. The fixed
position of fiber optic geophones facilitates multiple shots
for better quality and long-term monitoring of production.
In well seismic, acoustic fiber has been available but
not widely used, said Tad Bostick, vice president of optical
sensing at Weatherford,
Paulsson has spent his career on in-well seismic
imaging because it offers an advantage. Sound used for
in-well images only needs to make one trip through the
salt, which itself distorts the sound waves with a prismlike effect. This is better than having the added distortion
caused by a round trip, when sounds are also reflected back
to the surface.
Fiber has been used in seismic for ocean bottom
arrays, but not in wells this deep. Unlike traditional geophones, it has the advantage of being able to operate at
high temperatures. The goal is 1,000 3C receivers, compa-

40

FiberOptics.indd 40

rable to high-end geophones capable of picking up a range

of sounds and detecting which direction they come from.
The installation could run 25,000 ft and operate in places
with temperatures as high as 300C and pressures as high
as 30,000 psi.
The RPSEA project plan calls for it to make a fivereceiver prototype for testing by midyear, followed over
the next 18 months by a 100-receiver version, and then
the 1,000-receiver version inserted into wells using small
drill pipe.
Shell, in partnership with OptaSense, an arm of
Qinetiq, has developed a way to use standard optic fiber to
do the job of a multi-channel seismic receiver. The multichannel distributed acoustic system (DAS) is for production monitoring and can be used for other forms of acoustic
monitoring in the well.
In both cases, the techniques applied were developed for submarine warfare. Paulsson said using fiber optic
for geophones depends on the lessons learned in creating
hydrophones for the US Navy. Qinetiq is a longtime contractor for the United Kingdoms Royal Navy that created systems to process large volumes of sonar data. We are marrying a breakthrough sensing technology with cutting-edge
defense sonar processing, said Magnus McEwen-King,
managing director of OptaSense.
Paulsson and Qinetiq talk about the advantages of a
permanently installed system. This would avoid the risk of
moving equipment in and out of wells. Also a fixed monitoring system facilitates images that make it easier to track
changes over time.
With geophones to cover an entire wellbore, you
have to move them again and again. That would no longer
be needed with fiber, said Vianney Koelman, chief scientist
and fiber optics program leader at Shell International E&P.
DAS can cover the whole well in one gulp from the toe to
the wellhead.

JPT MARCH 2012

7/5/12 7:06 AM

Geophone
200

800 m

DAS
+800 m

800 m

+800 m

600
1000
m
1400
1800
2200

126 channels at 15 m spacing

177 channels at 10 m spacing

A pair of vertical seismic profiles done by Shell compares the

results of geophones, left, and a distributed acoustic sensor
(DAS) using fiber optic cable. The images are equivalent,
but the geophone array had to be repositioned to cover the
same distance inside the well used for carbon dioxide capture
andstorage.

The work of a fiber optic monitoring system is done by a

strand that is extremely fine. The fiber in the hands of Vianney
Koelman, chief scientist and fiber optics program leader at
Shell, has an even smaller core that conducts light surrounded
by a protectivelayer.

Generally, adding fibers able to observe a wider range of

things can better explain changes that do not present a clear,
unambiguous, thermal signature, Koelman said. For example,
a gas lift injector in one place in a well could change the temperature observed by sensors covering many meters. Adding
acoustic, strain, and pressure data can help locate the source.
On the other hand, temperature data can be used to determine
if a small change detected by the strain sensor is due to warming or cooling.
The monitoring systems on the Mars well are attempting
to see if water injected into the formation flows where it is supposed to, and how the gravel is packed around the sandscreen,
said Rustom Mody, vice president of technology for completions and production at Baker Hughes.
Koelman said, With strain sensing, we are learning a lot.
We are getting beautiful data from that installation, but it is
not withoutproblems.
The lessons learned from the first installation are now
being incorporated in the second sand-screen monitoring system being readied for installation by Baker Hughes.

seconds for each meter along the fiber cable. Acoustic fiber can
send 10,000 times as much data everysecond.
The future of fiber optic sensing depends on the rapid
evolution of the devices that process the data, called interrogators. Collecting more data from multiple sources puts a
premium on systems about to highlight exceptional data for
further study.
Work is just beginning to create programs integrating different kinds of fiber measurements. At Shell, the data
from different fibers flow into separate interrogator units.
Halliburton is working on systems able to integrate multiple
datastreams.

The Value of Knowing Now

For fiber to take off, these systems will need to develop faster
reflexes. The argument for installation of advanced sensors in
a well is it will not only identify problems, but also allow early
responses before they turn into more difficult problems.
Until now, data was collected and analyzed offsite to
figure out what happened, said McEwen-King of Qinetiq. But
when monitoring ongoing activities, such as fracturing, oilfield
operators need processing in real time.
There is also a practical problem presented by the amount
of acoustic data that can be generated. About a year ago, there
was no such thing as too much data to store. It is now a reality,
said McColpin. A temperature sensor can send a reading every 4

42

FiberOptics.indd 42

What Was That?

Being able to listen to what goes on in a well raises questions,
including, what is that sound? Some noises are easy to figure
out. An acoustic system can clearly pick up the clunk of a ball
landing in a seat to open a sleeve, or the rushing sound of fluids
around a leaking packer.
Others are not at all obvious. McEwen-King of Qinetiq,
which also installs security systems around above-ground
facilities, said that when a mysterious sound is detected outside a factory, it is easy enough to send someone out in search
of the source. That option is not available in a well.
There is also the question: How much? So far, acoustic is
mainly a qualitative data source for sound and vibration, said
Mody of Baker Hughes. Researchers are seeking ways to measure acoustic energy sources in wells to create detailed images
and make quantitative estimates.
Sound has proved to be useful in answering the question: Where is it located? John Hull, founder of HiFi Engineering, used fiber optics to create a logging tool able to find well
leaks faster and to more accurately measure temperature
andsound.

JPT MARCH 2012

7/5/12 7:06 AM

The leak detector uses sonar, which has a very high signal-to-noise ratio, Hull said. The system, used on more than
120 wells, was the product of 5 years of work on the tool, and
on a software system to interpret the data. He describes the
challenge as similar to developing a speech recognition system
on an iPhone and is working on a modified version of the fiber
capable of highly accurate sound detection.
Along the way, the Canadian inventor, who is now working on using fiber optics for monitoring the condition of long
stretches of pipeline, has become intensely interested in
sound quality. He said the job requires specially treated fiber
to get it right. With acoustics, more so than temperature and
pressure, it is all about how well you can recreate the input sig-

Fiber Optics Moving Past

Its Darkened Days
The path of fiber optics in the oil business has experienced ups and downs rivaling the industry it services. Around the turn of the century, fiber optics future
looked blindingly bright. And then the clouding appeared.
Clear optic fibers were quickly turning dark, killing permanent installations only months after they
went into service. The culprit was hydrogen. Fiber optic
cables that lasted years in the telecommunications
business became clouded when installed in high-temperature oil wells, where hydrogen is plentiful and heat
speeded the damage it caused.
Fiber optic monitoring depends on the cable being
extremely good at conducting a beam of light, but not
perfect. A small number of the photons in the beam are
reflected back because of imperfections in the cable,
both natural and, in some applications, man-made.
The reflected photons are tracked by a metering
device known as an interrogator, which is so precise it
can count the number of these backscattered photons.
Based on arrival times, the device can identify how far
the photons traveled in the cable before being reflected
back, which is used to identify what happened where.
With its future in jeopardy, the fiber optics industry developed a variety of ways to defend fiber against
hydrogen darkening. The techniques range from hydrogen scavenging gels that absorb hydrogen before it
gets in the cable to fibers that prevent hydrogen-silicon bonding.
In the six years since the new methods came
along, the problem appears to have been solved, but
hydrogen is a dogged opponent.
There is no way to completely avoid hydrogen,
said Philippe Legrand, product line manager for fiber
optics at Baker Hughes, which makes its own fiber formulated to resist clouding. He added, You have to learn
to live with it.

JPT MARCH 2012

FiberOptics.indd 43

nal to capture subtle differences in the sounds, Hull said, It

comes down to fidelity and sensitivity.
McEwen-King said the systems developed for Shell use
standard telecom fiber without any special modification. It is
cheaper and can be used for multiple purposes. He described
the sound quality as like your daughter playing music upstairs.
It is a little muffled.
It is hard to sort out competing claims about acoustic
performance. There are few comparable products on the market, and no oil industry benchmark for performance.
Hull said there needs to be a standard by which to compare the acoustic quality of in-well sensors. This would need to
rate both a devices ability to detect sound as well as its signal-to-noise ratio, which is like measuring the sound of a radio
broadcast versus the level of static in the background.
Both Hull and McEwen-King agree that the success of
these systems depends on the ability to turn large volumes of
data into useful information in a form that does not require an
expert to interpret it. For now, what is heard in oil wells is subject to interpretation.
The best analogy is the sonar operator on a nuclear
submarine, said Mendez. In the Navy, they have people who
have a good ear and know a certain signal is a whale a certain
number of kilometers off, and another is a school of tuna, and
another is an enemy submarine. But if the captain were there,
he might not know. JPT

For further reading:

SEG 2011-4253 Field Trials of Distributed Acoustic Sensing For
Geophysical Monitoring by J. Mestayer, Shell International, et al.
SPE 140561 First Downhole Application of Distributed
Acoustic Sensing (DAS) for Hydraulic Fracturing Monitoring and
Diagnostics by M.M. Molenaar, Shell Canada, et al.
SPE 15313 Interpreting Uncemented Multistage HydraulicFracturing Completion Effectiveness Using Fiber-Optic
DTS Injection Data by E.H. Holley, SPE, Pinnacle, Halliburton,
M.M.Molenaar, Shell Canada, et al.
SPE 118831 Optic Fiber Distributed Temperature for Fracture
Stimulation Diagnostics and Well Performance Evaluation
by Paul Huckabee, Shell Exploration and Production Company.
IADC/SPE 128304 Well-Integrity Monitoring and Analysis
Using Distributed Fiber-Optic Acoustic Sensors by John Hull,
HiFi Engineering, et al.
SPE 136565 Integrated Analysis Combining Microseismic
Mapping and Fiber-Optic Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS)
by E.H. Holley, Pinnacle Technologies, Halliburton, et al.
SPE 139347 Phase Implementation to Real Time Well Testing
Using Fiber Optical Sensing Technology, San Alberto San Antonio
Fields: Case StudyPart I by C.G. Ferraris, Petrobras and
L.E. Gonzalez, Weatherford.
JPT July 2011, Technology Update. Fiber-Optic Sensing
Technology Providing Well, Reservoir InformationAnyplace,
Anytime by J. Vianney Koelman, SPE, Shell International E&P.

43

7/5/12 7:06 AM