Oil & Gas - Maximising Recovery Programme (formerly SHARP) IOR Views

Welcome to the June 2005 issue of IOR Views. In consultation with our advisory committee, ACHARR, it was decided that we go for two issues a year. So this is the first issue for 2005, the tenth in all.

As the number of issues keep mounting up, one needs to be conscious that all past issues are available on the website, thus providing an excellent database of contemporary IOR articles that a ‘visitor’ could delight in. This probably partly explains the ever-increasing tally of ‘hits’ that David Hughes elucidates in his Editorial – over a quarter of a million hits in the period between Issues 9 and 10 (which may be compared with the 165,000 recorded between Issues 8 and 9). It is interesting to see that the top phrase used in the searches to link into IOR Views, over the past six months, has been ‘microbial enhanced oil recovery’.

In this issue too we have a crop of interesting articles. Stefan Muller’s article on Brent Field Depressurisation needs special mention, as it points to the culmination of a great success story. To change the development strategy from ‘oil field operation’, to ‘gas field operation’, in a field the size of Brent, at a cost of £1.3 billion, was truly a daunting decision taken in the early 1990s. The Shell engineers had of course conducted several man-years of lab work and done a tremendous amount of reservoir simulation work to identify the risks and form a strategy to contain them. I can recall long meetings with Willem Schulte and others from Shell who had the task of convincing the Department of Energy (now DTI) that this was a sound project. It is good to see the outcome very close to the prognosis, with the critical gas saturation coming in more favourable and the aquifer strength only slightly adverse. 

Andy Carr’s article on Stewardship - Raising the Game describes the latest DTI led initiative to improve the quality of stewardship in fields where it is needed. This is following up a recommendation from PILOT’s 2004 Brownfield Study. Nick Loizou in his article on Interpreting Palaeocene AVO Anomalies West of Shetlands points out that AVO does work here but needs to be understood with respect to the geology.

CO2 sequestration for emissions reduction with its links to IOR continues to be a topic that is assuming some momentum, and this is balanced by a note of caution by Michael Tholen’s (UKOOA) article Considerable Technical, Regulatory and Cost Barriers to Storing CO2 in North Sea Oil and Gas Fields, under Talking Point.

To combine the annual DTI IOR Seminar with DEVEX 2005 was the right decision. I am sure everyone who attended (18-19 May) will agree that it was a successful event. There is an article on it by David Hughes with links to the papers presented on DTI-sponsored JIPs, for the benefit of those who could not attend. Nigel Brealey’s article on the Heavy Oil Workshop, also held as part of DEVEX 2005, captures the proceedings very well. There is considerable interest in exploiting the remaining heavy oil reserves on the UKCS.

Lastly I would like to thank David Hughes for his untiring efforts in keeping in touch with the IOR community and the industry at large, and soliciting all these quality articles.