Tertiary recovery, or EOR (enhanced oil recovery), should become an integrated part of production operations, a senior executive from Shell has told a European offshore industry conference this week.
Speaking at a special EOR workshop at this morning's (26 March) Offshore Mediterranean Conference (OMC 2015) in Ravenna, Italy, Shell's Diederik van Batenburg said, rather that treating EOR as a unique business stream, is should be an integrated capability, linked to existing facilities but also in-house research, laboratories and leveraging the business' various geographic operations to share experience and learnings.
EOR, which includes techniques from miscible gas to thermal, CO2, solvent, and polymer EOR, is used to increase recovery rates from reservoirs.
According to Marco Brun, Shell country chairman for Italy and Adriatic countries: "Getting more from existing resources is one crucial way to help meet energy demand. On average, only around 35% of a field's oil is recovered. The rest remains trapped in the rock. Estimates suggest that EOR accounts for 4% of global production; boosting oil recovery could unlock about 300 billion bo, according to the International Energy Agency."
Shell started using steam EOR in 1930s and CO2 in 1990s. Shell's EOR projects are spread globally, from thermal EOR for heavy oil to low salinity water flood. But, to do EOR, using polymer or surfactant, more than reservoir engineering needs to be considered, says Diederik. The supply chain, including supply and logistics for the likes of getting polymers, for example, to the field, and even how produced water, which can then contain EOR chemicals, needs to the treated.
And, EOR project economics also differ from conventional projects, which have large investment up front, followed by oil peak and decline. EOR projects instead tend to be long-lived with production over decades, and investment spread over many years with injectant costs and/or project phasing.
"This creates learning curve potential and future decision points with the ability to build in flexibility to the development scheme to adapt to uncertainties and incorporate new innovations," he says.
There are also risks, including the costs, shortage of capability and slow pace of deployment, he says, setting out some ways these issues could be mitigated.
A An EOR project might be driven by materials availability too, if gas is available for EOR, for example.
Yesterday, OMC heard from Rubén Juanes, from MIT, who discussed the fundamentals of multiphase flow in EOR and how theoretical and computational results can analyze fluid mixing from viscous fingering, the impact of wettability on viscously unstable multiphase flow in porous media and fracturing in granular media.
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