American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2018 - 36

Industry In Motion

URTeC Brings Shale Experts Together
By Douglas Valleau
TULSA-The timing of the sixth annual
Unconventional Resources Technology
Conference, scheduled for July 23-25 at
Houston's George R. Brown Convention
Center, could not be better. With signs of
economic recovery starting to show up
all across the industry, now is the time to
get down to business!
The so-called shale revolution began
with the ingenuity of U.S.-based operators
figuring out how to produce oil and
natural gas from tight rocks. The progression of the technologies used to develop unconventional reservoirs has been
nothing short of incredible over the past
decade. Equally remarkable was the industry's ability to rapidly flip unconventional supplies from the high-cost to the
low-cost resource category following the
2014 price crash.
In fact, with dramatically improved
productivities and operational efficiencies,
onshore North American horizontal plays
emerged as arguably the brightest of the
bright spots throughout the long global
downturn. Today's improving business
environment further strengthens the economics of unconventionals, and potentially
could create opportunities to transfer certain shale play technologies and operational
practices to conventional and even deepwater projects.
Blessed with world-class geology, infrastructure and service company support,
the United States is smack dab in the
sweet spot of unconventional resource
development. Plays such as the Wolfcamp,
Bone Spring, SCOOP, STACK, Eagle
Ford, Bakken, Marcellus, Utica and Niobrara are spatially huge and really not all
that structurally complex, lending themselves to a manufacturing-type of development approach once they have been
discovered and appraised. Activity becomes almost like a machine that can be
36 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

quickly ramped up or down, which is a
major differentiator from conventional
reservoir operations, whether in North
America or anywhere around the globe.
This gives unconventional plays the
ability to be the "first responders" to
fluctuating market conditions. Fortunately,
those conditions are at last changing for
the better. Oil prices were in the $40s
last summer ahead of the 2017 URTeC
in Austin, but the conference was still an
overwhelming success with more than
3,100 attendees. This year, with the industry climbing out of the depressedprice scenario, we expect very strong attendance in Houston, the center of the
domestic oil and gas industry.
I have been fortunate to have been involved with URTeC since its inception.
It was started with the admittedly grand
challenge of becoming the Offshore Technology Conference for onshore unconventional plays. By any measure, it is
well on its way to reaching that objective.
URTeC has become the premier integrated
event that brings together all the scientific,
technological and business knowledge
necessary to find, appraise, analyze, develop and produce unconventional resources.
Even though "unconventional" is part
of our name, I am beginning to think that
it's perhaps not the correct term, considering that these affordable and plentiful
resources have become more conventional,
at least in North America. Instead, I tend
to think of unconventional formations as
"challenged resource plays" because of
the nature of the tight rock, land access
issues, technology needs, capital requirements, environmental and regulatory concerns, etc. Solving the challenges requires
a comprehensive approach spanning all
oil company departments, professional
disciplines and technology domains-from
land and finance, to geosciences, production
and environmental stewardship.

Working In Concert
That is where URTeC comes in. It is
the must-attend annual event for anyone
involved in resource plays. URTeC was
conceived based on input from oil and
gas company professionals. These individuals recognized early on in the shale
revolution the importance of having geologists, geophysicists, drilling engineers,
completion engineers, petrophysicists,
production engineers, business managers
and others all working in concert to
choreograph and optimize the numerous
activities related to developing tight oil
and shale gas assets (and, of course, to
improve the bottom-line results).
To that end, the American Association
of Petroleum Geologists jointly sponsors
URTeC with the Society of Petroleum
Engineers and the Society of Exploration
Geophysicists. Incidentally, the founding
of OTC 50 years ago was the only other
occasion when these three societies joined
together to sponsor a conference. The
technical expertise represented by AAPG,
SPE and SEG (and their combined worldwide membership of more than 170,000)
is supported and augmented by the participation of nine other URTeC endorsing
organizations:
* American Rock Mechanics Association;
* American Institute of Chemical Engineers;
* Association for Iron and Steel Technology;
* American Society of Civil Engineers;
* American Society of Mechanical
Engineers;
* Society for Mining, Metallurgy and
Exploration;
* Society of Petroleum Evaluation
Engineers;
* Society of Petrophysicists and Well
Log Analysts; and
* Minerals, and Metals and Materials
Society.

American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2018

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