Recent advances in production engineering

The purpose of this paper is to identify the most important advances in petroleum production engineering in the past decade. Of course. a review paper in the allotted space simply cannot do justice to all new technologies, especially tho that are gradual advances to established techniques. We then expound upon two technologies that we feel already have made or have the capacity to make quantum impacts on the petroleum industry. These are high-permeability fracturing (often referred to in the vernacular as frac-pack and variants) and complex well architecture (which deals with wells with a main or "mother" bore from which branches are drilled). At the end of this paper we have added a Bibliography section that includes several recent papers which, while not individually referenced in the text, add important contributions to the body of knowledge and experience in the two areas that we write about.