Some in the oil and gas industry are slow to adopt new technology, but that doesn't mean new technology is slow to develop in turn. Whether it's a new method for horizontal fracturing, or a technology from the gaming industry that speeds up data processing, or the use of innovations from the telecommunications industry to improve communications in remote areas, the breadth and depth of technology available to the industry is staggering.

At Apache Corp., one of Mike Bahorich's jobs is to keep his finger on the pulse of all of these new developments. With his company's operations spanning the globe, in some of the trickiest settings imaginable, he must stay on the cutting edge of technology to be sure his folks have access to what they need to get stay competitive.

Bahorich is executive vice president for E&P technology, so he's a good person to ask about new and exciting advances. And at the top of his list is the rapid improvement in multistage fracture-stimulation technology.

"Just a few years ago we would frac a horizontal well three or four times, and we thought that was pretty good," he said. "Now our base case in some areas is 20."

Multistage fracturing applies fracture treatments at different locations along the wellbore, resulting in what he refers to as "independent small wells." The number of fractures obviously increases production, and a 20-stage frac can produce up to 20 times the amount of a single vertical wellbore, though not always.

This technology has had such a profound effect on opening up new natural gas plays in North America that Bahorich calls it "the invention."

He notes, "Just a few years ago we had a gas bubble in North America—we just had too much gas. Then we popped that bubble, and we got to where we were actually struggling to find enough gas.

"Suddenly, with this invention, we now have a 100-year supply ahead of us."

With oil prices significantly higher than gas prices on an energy-equivalent basis, oil and gas operators are now utilizing this amazing invention to develop oil reservoirs, he says. "At first, the invention was applied to low-permeability oil reservoirs that were not economic to produce with conventional vertical wells. More recently, this technology is being applied to increase the recovery factor in oil reservoirs that have been traditionally developed with vertical completions.

"The economic impact of this invention on the global economy is stunning and yet few people understand this outside our industry."

Being a geophysicist by training, Bahorich also keeps tabs on advances in seismic technology. One that excites him is the development in land-acquisition techniques, where up to 100,000 channels can be recorded 24/7 with a shot density that "far surpasses what we used to think was practical," he says. "We're getting off a shot every five seconds now."

Additionally, advances in computing power have led to vastly improved algorithms and processing techniques such as reverse-time migration.

In his job as technology watch dog, he plans to continue keeping his eye out for anything that improves recovery, such as multistage fracturing. "In the next 10 years we're going to see a nice uplift in that area," he says. "I don't think we're nearly done."

He adds that to truly understand and characterize the shale plays will require an understanding of petrophysics "from the nano scale up to the reservoir scale. We need a better understanding of why some unconventional reservoirs work better than others and how to get the most out of them."

Bahorich graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia and has a master's degree in geophysics from Virginia Tech. Prior to joining Apache in 1996, he worked for Amoco, both in prospect generation and development and in research. While in that position he invented two geophysical concepts that are now widely used in the industry, including the Coherence Cube, the first method developed for directly viewing faults within a seismic image. He received the Virgil Kauffman Award from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists in 1998.

Bahorich is a member of the board of trustees of the Houston Museum of Natural Science and serves on advisory boards at Stanford and Yale universities. He holds eight patents.