Enhanced Oil Recovery

[Music] on average only 35% of oil is recovered from the ground leaving around two-thirds behind with demand for energy increasing by more than 30 percent by 2035 the world needs to produce more oil more efficiently from existing resources we appear to have reached a point globally when the potential for enhanced recovery from existing resources exceeds the potential from new discoveries aor creates opportunities for lower cost production with less environmental impact BP is the leading international oil company in the delivery of conventional oil production using AOR the key challenge is implementing these technologies successfully in any margin environment VP's strategy for technology development in the ER space is to develop technologies that are low cost that are very widely applicable around the world and are readily deployable our unique expertise in water injection eor means we're the only company in the world currently deploying a low sell yo our project we are also exploring ways to improve efficiency of our water floods specifically with a novel polymer technology polymer actually attempts to change the physical properties of the water injection so you add polymer you can discuss a fiber fluid that actually helps prevent the water from fingering through the oil it also slows the water down that's shooting through high permeability streaks and layers in the reservoir acts in a more piston like displacement and therefore improves your sweep and gets more oil out of the ground the addition of polymer to water injection is not a new idea but it has its own inherent problems that make it difficult to deploy sometimes if you have to inject through a complicated injection system you actually degrade the polymer it goes through subsea chokes for instance and actually gets broken down polymer chains are very long molecules and inherently weak to shear forces is the length of the polymer chain that actually adds viscosity so if you chop up that chain into smaller bits you lose a lot your viscosity as a result we've been collaborating with Nalco champion on developing a reservoir triggered polymer which has the ability once applied to the water to viscosity only when it is deep within the reservoir if you can add your polymer and it doesn't actually activate until it gets into the reservoir then you get you have your cake and eat it the long polymer chain is constrained into a ball within that ball holding it together our stimulus responsive bonds designed to react or trigger by temperature the region around the wellbore is well stripped of water it's going to be a lot cooler once it reaches what we call the thermal front deep out in the reservoir the bonds start to trigger and the polymer can unfurl and this gotta fire the fluid together with now co-champion we've developed and bench tested this new polymer technology and it has now been filled trialed to prove it behaves as intended at field scale before we invest in any technology we need to demonstrate very very clearly in a reservoir that it does what it says on the can so what we're looking for in this trial first is how does it inject the pressure that it's going to inject with in comparison to water and second do we see that triggering event and are we able to produce the polymer at the producing well with the viscosity that we expect the field trial has been successful the polymer was injected without being degraded with minimal impact on injectivity and subsequently activated deep within the reservoir we were able to take a down whole sample in our production well that showed the viscosity of the polymer sample was the same as an unshared reference sample that we had a surface additionally we had the down hole gauge data in the injector and this showed that as the polymer started to trigger down low pressure increased those same gauges also gave us data during a series of pressure buildup and pressure fall-off tests and that allowed us to infer what was going on in the resin and see the developing viscous polymer bank the success of the field trial is further proof of BP's leadership position in enhanced oil recovery and our commitment to recover more of the world's oil from existing reservoirs as far as we're concerned if we can develop viscosity if the water in the subsurface then we're going to get incremental oil it actually will benefit most of our water flooded reservoirs there's widespread candidates across our portfolio that could use this technology

Channel: bp

Views: 22,802

Keywords: bp, oil, recovery, energy, gas, drilling, exploration, production

Id: RtPdFsyqbrw

Length: 4min 48sec (288 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018