Preface

This volume of SPE’s new Petroleum Engineering Handbook contains 12 chapters concerning technologies that were not covered in the 1987 edition of the Handbook. In fact, most of these technologies either were in their infancy or did not exist at the time that edition was prepared. Several of these topics have been selected because they represent areas of technology for which sufficient technical progress has now been achieved to result in large-scale commercialization.

In some cases, these chapters cover aspects of the technologies presented in the other five volumes, but here, specific chapters describe unique technology developed either in what could be described as being on the “periphery” of these five volumes or as “emerging” areas of technology that have “budded and blossomed” during the past two decades. Some of these technologies have been developing very rapidly during the period that this Handbook went from inception to completion.