What's new in production

Norway’s penchant for planning is surely an industry exemplar. The country’s OG21 Technology Strategy for the Petroleum Sector is one example. Established in 2001, OG21 intends to identify technology priorities for efficient and environmentally responsible petroleum activities on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS).

Oil companies, universities, research institutions, suppliers, and governments cooperate through OG21 in a concerted national effort to strengthen research, development, demonstration, and com-mercialization of technologies that can solve challenges for the petroleum industry in Norway.

This is an acknowledgement that the petroleum industry has, over the last 50 years, become Norway’s most important industry. In 2014, it accounted for over 50% of all Norwegian exports, and about 30% of government revenues.

As the organization notes, technology has been key to the development of the NCS and a successful Norwegian supplier industry. So far, the development and application of advanced technology has contributed to the production of about 47% of estimated resources on the NCS.

But OG21 isn’t the only game in town. The National IOR Centre of Norway provides solutions for improved oil recovery on the NCS through academic excellence and close cooperation with the industry. The Centre started up in December 2013, to develop new knowledge and technology, in order to increase recovery beyond projections under today’s field operation plans.

The IOR Centre is led by the University of Stavanger, with research institutes IRIS and IFE. Several other research groups, and 11 oil and service companies, complete the Centre’s list of partners.

The Centre will contribute to the implementation of environmentally friendly technologies for improving oil recovery on the NCS.

The IOR Centre is up to some interesting stuff, as their Work Plan 2018 outlines. Below are a few examples from an impressive catalog of projects.

Waterflood and EOR simulation. One project, named with uncharacteristic enthusiasm in the title, “Deliverable Of an Unbeatable Core Scale Simulator,” is to develop a numerical tool, IORCoreSim, to interpret all kinds of special core analyst lab experiments. By using IORCoreSim, the key parameters needed to simulate water flooding and EOR processes at pilot and sector scale, are extracted from the lab experiments.

The plan describes the knowledge gap: There are only a limited number of simulators available that can handle geochemical interactions, multi-phase flow and flow of non-Newtonian fluids in porous me-dia. Some simulators may have the ability to simulate geochemical interactions but there are no feedback mechanisms from the interactions to the flow parameters, such as relative permeability, capillary pressure and viscosity.

Metallic nanoparticles. Another project that sounds anything but run-of-the-mill is investigating the possibility of reducing the viscosity of highly viscous oil by using size-controlled, metallic nanoparticles. This is done by using the nanoparticles as catalysts to facilitate the decomposition of long-chain hydrocarbons, together with the removal of heteroatoms and heavy metals. A reduction in oil viscosity may improve oil mobility, which should contribute to the cause
of EOR.

The project also aims to investigate in-situ heavy oil recovery using a model core, as well as the synergistic effect of SiO₂ -supported nanoparticles on ultimate heavy oil recovery.

Flow of non-Newtonian fluids in porous media. The purpose of this project is to design lab experiments that will provide information about the transport properties of polymer-based fluids in porous media. Polymer fluids are complex, and there is currently no complete theoretical understanding of their transport properties in a reservoir, where polymer molecules are exposed to temperature, salinity and pressure gradients. This project will generate data and models that will be used in IORCoreSim and IORSim to predict the fate and effect of polymer flooding for improved oil recovery.

It seeks to fill a substantial knowledge gap, described as the difficulty of evaluating the field performance of polymer flooding using current simulation models. The models that describe polymer flood-ing are usually crude and do not take into account all of the chemical reactions that can take place when the pore fluid interacts with the rock. This is necessary, in order to be able to predict how the polymer solution will propagate through the reservoir and displace the oil.

These last two deliverables are PhD theses, so it may be some time before your service company is hawking their offspring at trade shows.

IORSim project new release. On the other hand, the IORSim project is more commercial in nature, with a new release as its objective. The project goal is to further develop the IORSim simulator, which improves the capabilities of industry standard reservoir simulators, to simulate IOR processes. This is done in a modular way by letting the industry standard reservoir simulator carry out the fluid flow predictions, while IORSim simulates the transportation of chemicals, interactions and effects on the flow parameters.

IOR Centre says IORSim makes it possible to perform advanced geochemical IOR simulations within any existing reservoir simulator. This fills a large gap for oil companies, which have invested a lot of resources in building reservoir cases within the concept of one specific reservoir simulator. Also, the separation of flow calculation and chemical species calculation enhances accuracy and efficiency of computing time.