Tracerco Completes $5million Upgrade of North American Facilities to Better Serve its Customers

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16 May 2016

World leading technology company Tracerco, part of the FTSE 100 Johnson Matthey Plc, has completed a major $5 million upgrade of their facilities in Houston in order to better serve customers. The new facilities include an environmentally controlled subsea simulation tank to prepare their unique and patented subsea diagnostic technologies prior to mobilisation offshore. In addition, they have expanded and upgraded their reservoir tracer laboratory in order to process greater sample numbers that provide critical reservoir flow information for well testing, hydraulic frac, and secondary recovery applications.

The upgrade, expanding their footprint by 25,000 sqft, has been custom designed to meet present and future business needs. The subsea simulation facility allows for extensive pre-job trials and qualification testing of their Discovery™ and recently developed Explorer™ technologies in replicated subsea conditions to verify their technologies can detect a specific defect or flow assurance issue.  The expanded reservoir tracer laboratory has allowed the installation of more sensitive instrumentation to enhance data interpretation and provide a five-fold increase in sample analysis capability allowing more rapid turnaround of results. The information generated assists customers with critical reservoir management decisions to maximise reservoir extraction efficiencies.

In the challenging market conditions that the industry faces today, reducing lift costs is paramount. Both Tracerco’s reservoir and subsea technologies are ideally placed in order to assist with this need. Tracerco’s flagship subsea technology, Discovery™, has proven itself to save operators tens of millions in flow assurance remediation, by accurately identifying the extent and full nature of restrictions or blockages so that the operator can plan proper remediation to be effective the first time or optimise a chemical injection programme to prevent scale build. In addition, Discovery™ can accurately measure wall thickness and pipe defects, such as corrosion, even through a pipe’s protective coatings. This has saved operators conducting asset integrity or life extension inspections around 35% on costs by eliminating the need to remove coatings.

Likewise, Tracerco’s reservoir technologies offer highly cost effective alternatives to well interventions. They are proven in all kinds of well designs the world over and to date around 7,000 zones have been tagged with Tracerco’s Smart Tracer technology. Smart Tracers provide accurate, repeatable flow data over several years at a fraction of the cost of production logs. Tracerco’s in-house team of expert reservoir engineers analyse data providing a comprehensive customer service from project design, field application to data interpretation allowing operators to get the most from their field development plans.

Vince Atma Row, Upstream Commercial Director for Tracerco commented:

"We are committed to providing our customers in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond with the best possible service, and so investment in appropriate facilities in the region is a crucial part of our strategy. Although the market conditions are challenging at this time, Tracerco’s innovative technologies create value for our customers, as they offer cost effective alternatives to traditional methods of gaining critical data, allowing overall lift costs to be reduced. Even in a depressed market, there are still exciting opportunities for us to grow our offering and services as we strive to solve our customers’ measurement challenges with innovative thinking, and service excellence.”