Conundrum: when to adopt technology: Every executive must decide when new technology adds to valuve to a company

摘要

Over the span of the last 30 years there has been a continuous stream of technological innovations in the oil and gas business. Such technologies as horizontal wells, deepwater wells, measurement while drilling (MWD), logging while drilling (LWD), extended reach wells, and 3-D seismic are but a few technologies that somehow broke through an undefined barrier to become part of companies' accepted repertoire of technology processes or tools. Yet some technologies sputtered, faltered and finally faded. In fact, many of the successful technologies of today were potential failures in the making early in the life of the technology. If an analysis were done, for example, around the early 1980s about extended reach drilling, no one would have predicted not only the number of wells drilled, but the actual reach that was attained. Nor would anyone back in the early 1980s have predicted the evolution of horizontal and multilateral technologies and how quickly they became staples for many field developments.