The status of tight oil drilling technique in North America and its enlightenment to China

Being affected by the low price of natural gas, North America is experiencing a tight oil evolution following the previous shale gas evolution; both fracturing quantity and production have increased greatly, leading an unconventional oil/gas resource revolution in the world. The successful development of unconventional resources represented by shale gas and tight oil is closely related with the advance of technologies like horizontal wells. This paper has investigated the important role played by technical advance in the great increase of tight oil production in North America from the point of view of drilling engineering technology. The paper first introduces the distribution of tight oil in North America, the history of the development of drilling technologies and the scale of present fracturing operations, and then analyzes the future drilling technology development trend through systematically examining the principal and leading-edge drilling technologies used in tight oil basins in North America, so as to provide reference for the development of tight oil in China, which has just got started.