Chevron joins SLB and TotalEnergies’ Arena collaboration on digital subsurface technologies

SLB announced that the Chevron Technology Center has officially joined Arena, the long-term subsurface digital technology collaboration program established by SLB and TotalEnergies in 2024, to participate in the joint development of next-generation digital technologies for reservoir engineering and geoscience.

Chevron will contribute funding, intellectual property, and technical capabilities to the collaboration and provide expertise in uncertainty analysis, optimization, and field development planning.

Arena’s technology development scope covers reservoir engineering and geoscience workflows. Under the collaboration arrangement, professionals from TotalEnergies and Chevron will be embedded in SLB technology centers and work with SLB product development teams on technology development, with operators’ reservoir, geoscience, and development planning requirements feeding directly into the product R&D process. With this addition, Arena’s participants have expanded from SLB and TotalEnergies to three parties: SLB, TotalEnergies, and Chevron.

In Arena, Chevron will focus on contributing capabilities in uncertainty analysis, optimization, and field development planning. The relevant technologies will be integrated with digital tools and AI workflows for subsurface resource evaluation, reservoir engineering analysis, and development decisions. SLB will continue to undertake the development of digital and subsurface engineering technologies, while TotalEnergies and Chevron will provide the development team with technical personnel and application requirements from the oil and gas operator side.

In July 2024, SLB and TotalEnergies signed a 10-year digital technology cooperation agreement, initially focused on developing reservoir engineering, geoscience modeling, and interpretation software, and planned to combine AI capabilities with SLB’s Delfi digital platform. The two parties determined at the time that newly developed software would be cloud-deployed and that reservoir simulation, geological interpretation, and subsurface data processing would be advanced based on an open technology architecture.

SLB, TotalEnergies, and Chevron had previously also jointly participated in the development of the Intersect reservoir simulator. This Arena collaboration continues to cover reservoir simulation, subsurface modeling, and related digital workflows; the three parties will continue joint development of subsurface digital technologies based on scalable, open, and extensible architectures.

Shanghai SAGA Offshore Engineering Co., Ltd., founded in Shanghai in 2016, is an integrated technology company spanning R&D, design, manufacturing and service. It focuses on separation and filtration equipment for the oil, gas and petrochemical industries. Its advanced suite includes de-oiling/dewatering hydrocyclones, desanders for micron-sized particles and compact flotation units. SAGA also supplies complete skid-mounted solutions, third-party equipment retrofitting and after-sales service. The company owns multiple proprietary patents and maintains a DNV-GL certified ISO-9001, ISO-14001 and ISO-45001 management system.

SAGA's high-efficiency cyclone desanders, recognized by international energy leaders, achieve a 98% separation rate. Manufactured with advanced wear-resistant ceramics, they remove 98% of particles as fine as 0.5 microns in gas streams. This allows produced gas reinjection for miscible flooding in low-permeability reservoirs—an important pathway for enhancing oil recovery in challenging formations. The units can also treat produced water, removing 98% of particles larger than 2 microns for direct reinjection, thus improving water-flood efficiency and reducing environmental impact.

The new High Efficiency Ultra-Fine Particle Desander is a liquid-solid separation device that employs an efficient centrifugal principle. It separates suspended impurities—solids in produced water, seawater, condensate, fine particles in high-viscosity liquids and catalyst powder in reactors—from fluids (liquids, gases or gas-liquid mixtures). It captures solid particles down to 2 microns at 98% efficiency. The device offers high sand removal efficiency, a compact footprint, no external power or chemical additives, an operational lifespan of about 20 years, and online sand discharge with no production shutdown.

Field-proven in major global fields operated by CNOOC, CNPC, Petronas and others across Southeast Asia, SAGA desanders are installed on wellhead and production platforms. They ensure reliable solids removal from gas, well fluids and condensate and are essential to seawater purification, production stream protection and water injection/flooding programs.

SAGA's broader separation portfolio covers membrane systems for natural gas CO₂ removal, deoiling hydrocyclones, high-performance compact flotation units (CFUs), Shale gas desanding, Cyclonic dewatering package with produced water treatment, and multi-chamber hydrocyclones, offering comprehensive solutions for the industry's toughest challenges.