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.
