The oil company's technological innovation strategy has achieved positive results, especially in North America shale oil and gas. From the end of 2014 to the end of 2016, the cost of unconventional drilling in North America has decreased by 38%, and the cost of completion has decreased by 40% in just two years. The profit and loss balance cost of shale oil and gas in North America has fallen from $70 per barrel in 2014 to the recent price between $40 and $50 per barrel since oil price started falling in 2014, which made the shale oil have survived the brutal competition of Opec's low-cost crude oil supply. The large, long - cycle, high - Investment deepwater projects of the international oil company have passed a series of technological innovation measures. The profit and loss balance cost is also decreasing, and becomes more competitive. For example, the cost of BP's Maddog project in the Gulf of Mexico has been reduced from $85 to $95 per barrel to current $45. Even the worst of the oil sands, comparing with its relatively good-quality oil sands project cost nearly $50 per barrel. According to the analysis data of Wood McKinsey in 2017, the cash flow balance of international big oil companies in the next two years is about 55 dollars per barrel, and this data is up to 90 U.S. dollars / barrel in 2016.
International oil companies have achieved positive results by technological innovation. The traditional fields such as seismic exploration, drilling engineering, unconventional and deep-sea oil and gas exploration and development technology are still the main battlefields of the technological progress and innovation of the oil industry. In each subdivision area, the technological progress of the oil and gas industry has made great progress. For example, seismic inversion technology, anisotropic inversion imaging technology can provide accurate density, direction, fracture density and rock brittleness of tight reservoir anisotropy, so as to better implement hydraulic fracturing and get the best fracturing effect. The software assisted seismic interpretation technology provides a fully integrated environment for the analysis of seismic data. Paradigm introduces visual theater description exploration and development workflow technology in seismic data processing and imaging programs. In terms of unconventional engineering technology, cluster type horizontal well and factory operation, continuous well drilling and MRC well technology, micro hole fish bone production technology, broadband fracturing technology and high-speed channel fracturing technology have been widely concerned and applied. Great progress has been made in the seventh generation of drilling from the depth of 3500 meters, and the large-scale, integrated and serialized marine equipment. Recently, BP has developed seismic imaging technology based on full waveform inversion technology and can greatly improve the quality of seismic data. It helped BP discover more than 200 million barrels of oil in the gulf of Mexico Atlantis. Beck Hughes launched a new deepwater multilevel fracturing technology called DEEPFRAC in May this year, which could reduce the cost of single well operations by 40 million dollars. These two are typical cases in which the oil and gas industry has made technical progress in the traditional field.
