In today’s economic climate, using existing infrastructure to gain increased production whilst reducing the complexity and costs of operations has become paramount.
The Wood Report recommends that the industry deploys existing technologies to full effect and that new technologies are developed to maximise recovery from the UKCS – a recommendation that is particularly relevant for Improved Oil Recovery (IOR) and Reservoir Management techniques.
The industry has become adept at collecting and analysing large volumes of data to assess subsurface conditions, but these techniques typically require complex and expensive data acquisition – e.g. 4D seismic – in association with large scale model analysis. The complexity of these techniques means that results and interpretations on the performance of injection operations during IOR activities are often derived days, weeks or months after measurements have been collected from the field.
Meanwhile, surveys carried out on the Norwegian Continental Shelf by the Norwegian Petroleum Safety Authority, Sintef and independent PhD studies show that up to 33% of injection wells experience out of zone injection, and that many reservoir integrity issues go undetected for very long periods of time – sometimes for years.
These published data, which can be extrapolated to other oil provinces, indicate that many injection wells do not fully contribute to IOR and that opportunities to optimise the recovery from oil reserves in the North Sea and globally are therefore being lost.
Today, subsurface operations rarely exploit the wealth of information that can be derived from real-time empirical data, measured directly from the well and using existing well site hardware.
New technology, GeoTool Inject, developed by Geomec, a Stavanger based specialist subsurface injection technology company, in collaboration with operators on the UK and Norwegian Continental Shelf, uses these well site data to provide a real-time view of the reservoir conditions during IOR activities.
The software technology, in essence, allows an injector to be used as an observation well during injection operations and provides up-to-the-minute, rapidly accessible information on the integrity, performance and safety of both the well and the reservoir.
The system is designed for all subsurface injection operations and significantly reduces analysis times, and automatically triggers alerts for breaches of subsurface condition thresholds.
Based upon data from the above surveys and from Geomec’s own projects with operators globally, the technology allows an increase of IOR production by a conservative estimate of 10% and an increase in Ultimate Oil Recovery by at least 2.5% through greater water injection efficiency.
In partnership with ITF, and with backing by the Norwegian Demo 2000 fund, Geomec are launching a Joint Industry Project on the UK and Norwegian Continental Shelf to further develop the technology and to provide the industry with a real-time micro mass-balance capability across multiple wells and fields and the facility to utilise rich empirical subsurface information to supplement large scale models for reservoir management and modelling purposes.
