Editorial

The SHARP IOR eNewsletter is edited on behalf of the DTI Licensing and Consents Unit by David Hughes (david.hughes@senergyltd.com), Principal Reservoir Engineer with Senergy Ltd in Aberdeen .

Welcome to the sixth issue of the SHARP IOR eNewsletter.

Firstly I am sure you would like to join me in congratulating Tissa on being awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for his efforts heading up SHARP. We look forward to seeing a picture of his investiture in the next issue.

Jim Munns, DTI reported in the last issue on the 21st Round offshore licence applications. Following evaluation of the applications the awards were announced on 31 July 2003 ( http://www.og.dti.gov.uk/upstream/licensing/21_11_rnds/rd21awdblock.doc) .

In this edition we have an interesting collection of articles covering Magnus (the WAG project plus the results of an innovative study looking at changing the injectant to CO2 ), history matching using time lapse seismic , CO2 injection in Weyburn and initiatives to increase the accessibility of legacy data . The university and SME contributions cover air injection , pore scale modelling , gas condensate well productivity , depressurisation , enhanced gas recovery , microbial EOR and Brent sedimentology .

The " talking point " has been kindly contributed by Jon Gibbins from Imperial College . He is challenging all of us to grasp the nettle and recognise that the inherent flexibility of existing coal power stations (upgraded for carbon capture and storage) combined with using the CO2 for EOR is the real alternative to relatively inflexible nuclear plants to supplement the intermittent production from renewables.

There is an innovation this year in the reports on the DTI IOR Research Dissemination Seminar and the IEA EOR Workshop and Symposium . Key papers presented at the meetings are accessible (in PDF format) by clicking on the paper titles (JIP papers only for DTI meeting; UK papers only for IEA meeting).

You will see that all the articles have a feedback box at the end. Please use this to provide your comments - these will be checked by me and then made available for other readers to view in a day or so.

My apologies that this issue is one month behind schedule. We were trying hard to get all the contributions in on time and this was compounded by various holiday arrangements! We have reviewed the situation regarding the next edition. This will now be issued in February 2004. Articles and other submissions for inclusion in the next issue should be supplied by 16 January 2004 .

Statistics Relating to Issue 5

During the nearly five month period since 2 June 2003 when Issue 5 went live on the website, the eNewsletter has received 70,000 hits. There were 11,000 visits from 3700 unique visitors. Of course Issue 5 and all the previous issues are available for viewing on the website and these statistics cover all issues.

The table below shows the statistics relating to the top five technical articles from Issue 5. In addition, the various features received typically 150-200 visits.

Malcolm Greaves' article " Air Injection Processes: Heavy Oil Recovery and In-situ Upgrading; Light Oil Recovery " from Issue 2 continues to be the most popular article overall with 234 visits in the last five months (average viewing time 2:04 ). What's the betting Malcolm will top the "visits" next time with his new article ?

Distribution

The email notifying the contents of a new issue of the eNewsletter is sent to an automated distribution list. If you are not registered and wish to receive future email notifications (three issues per year) or to remove yourself from the list, please click here for more information .

Of course you do not need to have received an email to be able to view the SHARP IOR eNewsletter. The current and all previous issues are always available for viewing on the website .

Contributed Articles

The DTI welcomes the submission of material for inclusion in the SHARP IOR eNewsletter. IOR is interpreted very widely and can include any initiative that leads to improved exploration, appraisal, development or recovery of oil and gas.

If you would like to submit an article or other contribution for inclusion in the next issue of the eNewsletter, please provide the text in a Word document. Please provide separately any graphic objects included in the Word document. If these originated from Excel or PowerPoint then please send these files also. Any other graphic objects should be sent as .jpg files or other high quality graphic format files. Submitting the graphic objects in separate files provides us with better originals for use in constructing the web pages. Ideally all the files relating to a single article should be zipped into a single file prior to submission.

Please keep contributions relatively short and make liberal use of hyperlinks to other material on your own website. As a guide the equivalent of around two pages of A4 of text, plus 2-4 graphic objects should be sufficient. Please also send an electronic passport-type photo of the author(s).

Contributions should be submitted at any time to iornewsletter@senergyltd.com . These will be reviewed and if appropriate published in the next issue. The copy deadline for the next issue is 16 January 2004 .

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all of you who have supplied the articles and features for this issue. I appreciate the time that you spent preparing your contributions.

Thanks also to Tissa for his support and Chris in the IT department at RML. The redesign of the eNewsletter home page is underway and should be complete in the next month or so. Among other features this will provide a facility to keyword search the SHARP IOR eNewsletter archive.

Disclaimer: The material available on this website is designed to provide general information only. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that the information provided is accurate, it does not constitute legal or other professional advice.
Please note: The Department of Trade and Industry cannot be held responsible for the contents of any pages referenced by an external link.