Subsurface engineering and geoscience

Identifying and solving complex technical problems below the surface can be a challenge. Our specialists in petroleum geology and engineering can supplement your team to enhance the profitability of your oil and gas properties, as well as provide strategic evaluations regarding long-term asset management.

Our consulting services include geological modeling, formation evaluation, geophysics and petrophysics, drilling engineering, reservoir simulation, artificial lift selection and design, completions, and production engineering.

We can assist you with your field development planning, and work with you from initial exploration programs and characterization of your resource through recovery scheme selection and implementation.

Field development planning

Whether it’s unlocking the most remote reserves, overcoming the harshest environments, or commercializing the most marginal of fields, we’ve got the expertise and innovation to maximize your development opportunity.

From reservoir to market, we bring a fully integrated and customized approach tailored to align with your business drivers and project delivery processes. A ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is no longer good enough and there is no substitute for in-depth subject matter expertise. Our in-house experts can deliver the ability to undertake reservoir uncertainty and lifetime variations, process facility analysis, rotating equipment expertise, screening tools, and cost and bench-marking data, all of which is provided with a clear audit trail for decision-making.

Onshore, offshore, and subsea engineering

Our skills enable us to develop fields in the deepest oceans and the most remote, arid deserts. Offshore real estate is limited and expensive. We have to ‘fit’ facilities into the confined space and yet also ensure the facilities keep the people on board safe. Transporting the fluids from the seabed requires a deep understanding of fluid flow and operating philosophy to avoid blocking flowlines through hydrates.

Onshore, our challenges are often to do with logistics and remote locations. Equipment must travel by road and fit within very defined transport envelopes. Multi-train solutions are most prevalent. Our knowledge lets us design the most economic and environmentally friendly facilities.

Production facilities design

We’ve provided engineering services to numerous projects, installing pipelines and well-site facilities to tie in oil and natural gas production, and water injection wells. Our experienced team can help optimize your field development. We design and install all aspects of oil and gas field facilities inclusive of well tie-ins, gathering systems, field compressor stations, phase separation, gas dehydration and sweetening, produced water handling and disposal, and can assist with difficult issues around emulsion breaking and multi-phase flow measurements. And we’ll install the communication systems to let you monitor and control remotely.

We can look at optimization of existing installations and expansions, and analyze the most cost-effective arrangements of field facilities, from central battery/compression facilities to smaller, satellite battery/compression facilities.

Flow assurance

Flow assurance is more than the study of fluid flow, it plays a significant role in ensuring continuous and manageable oil and gas production. Because of this understanding, we value the importance of full life-cycle analysis, the different types of artificial lift, and the boundaries of flow modeling—and how far to push those boundaries.

We provide an overarching capability to link and optimize gathering systems and host/facility interfaces both onshore and subsea. We achieve this through the application of extensively recognized experience, state-of-the-art tools (including PIPESIM, OLGA, PIPENET, and MAXIMUS), and in-house, custom-built programs to address client-specific needs. We partner with you to mitigate your corrosion concerns, ensuring your system’s robustness from first production to end-of-life across the full range of operating and shutdown scenarios.

Process system modeling

Coupling flow assurance capabilities with process dynamics ensures that your operation will achieve remarkable results. By assembling and linking models—principally the output of the OLGA dynamic multiphase flow simulator to the input of process simulation software programs like HYSYS Dynamics—we are adept to forecast how your processing system will react when faced with serious instability. This allows us to action small changes to your operation and ensure the gas is properly utilized, the compressors continue to run, and flaring is avoided.

Transient analysis also allows us to measure the speed of response of production safety systems. The transients can be very fast when considering line-packed situations and in this case the valve closing speed becomes critical. Process dynamics gives you the ability to optimize your operation.

Enhanced oil recovery

The right techniques for enhanced oil recovery can maximize the amount of oil and gas that can be recovered—and do it more quickly. We have the know-how to deploy technologies for CO2 miscible floods, thermal recovery, water floods, and polymer floods while also helping you to maintain and enhance reservoir pressure and design artificial lift systems to enhance oil and gas production to the surface, unlocking value and maximizing revenue

We’ve completed projects in both sour natural-gas processing and CO2 miscible floods. This combination of experience covers the full range of requirements for the surface-facilities design of carbon capture and sequestration projects. Our involvement has extended to CO2-capture pilot plants and the long-term sequestration of carbon dioxide in both depleting oil fields and deep saline aquifers.

Oil sands, oil shale, and mineable oil recovery

Responsible development is key to the industry’s sustainable growth. Efficient recovery, minimization of environmental impacts, and effective project management and execution strategies are key drivers for growth. Developers involved in extracting and producing unconventional oil products need cutting-edge technology to maximize returns and minimize impacts on the ecosystem. Tools such as computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis help prove the viability and efficiency of our clients' projects. From mining through to ore preparation, hydrotransporting, extraction and tailings, and upgrading, we work with our clients to provide value-added solutions.

In situ solvent extraction

Hatch has been a major partner in Nsolv, a new in situ solvent-extraction technology for the production of oil. Nsolv uses less energy and produces 80 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than traditional methods. It uses no water and very little natural gas and produces a better-quality oil and a higher return on investment.