Reuters is reporting:
Oil producer Hess Corp has turned to a manufacturing process developed
by automaker Toyota Motor Corp to cut costs and boost production as crude oil
prices lag.
Deploying a process called Lean manufacturing, and used by
only a handful of other oil producers, the move has shaved roughly
$400,000 off the cost of each North Dakota well in the past eight
months, a savings that comes even as Hess adds more sand and frac stages
on each well.
By mirroring Toyota, which pushed its employees relentlessly
each day to focus on ways to produce cars cheaply and more
efficiently, steps that helped it rival Detroit automakers, Hess
hopes to emerge from the oil price slump stronger than peers.
The New York-based company believes that by using Lean
manufacturing its 1,200 operated Bakken wells can remain
profitable with U.S. crude oil prices above $40 per
barrel, roughly $9 below current levels.
Hess also said it could go so far as to survive with oil
around those levels for the next eight years.
I think we're going to see a lot of this, also, going forward.
Reuters is reporting:
The tech geeks are coming to the oil industry's rescue.
With the price of crude plumbing lows not seen since 2009, Royal Dutch Shell,
Whiting Petroleum Corp and many others are turning to rocket fuel, Big
Data, lasers, spectrometers and other new or revamped technologies to do
more for less.
As North
America's oil companies slash spending and lay off workers, established
services firms and start-ups are hawking products that better assess oil
and gas deposits, help drill fewer but bigger new wells, and boost
output from old ones.
It
is too early to judge whether the new tools can produce gains similar
to those of the past six years, when well output kept rising at
double-digit rates and the time needed to drill and frack new wells
dwindled to about 10 days from 40.
Baker Hughes Inc
saw more client inquiries about products that increase efficiency of
existing wells in the first three months this year than in all of the
past two years.
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