Introduction

Tissa Jayasekera OBE ( tissa.jayasekera@dti.gsi.gov.uk ) is Manager of the DTI's LCU-LED SHARP programme

Welcome to the October issue of our newsletter, the third for this year (sixth in all).

David Hughes in his editorial gives an update on the statistics of "visits" to the newsletter, which as expected is still on an upward trend.

We had a very productive IEA EOR workshop/symposium in September 2003, in Regina . The symposium was slanted towards geological storage of CO2 - see David Hughes' article on the event. Our newsletter was in popular demand there with several individuals keen to get on the circulation list. This gives the newsletter a wider international reach. This will be very welcome, for, although its primary intention is to pull together IOR activities in the UK , an international forum with a lively exchange of ideas and research results will be immensely beneficial. The IEA event also included a field trip to the Weyburn CO2 EOR project - see David Hughes' article on this.

In the previous issue we had under "Talking Point" the article by John Brooks expressing his concerns on the fall in exploration drilling activity since his days as Director of the Licensing and Exploration branch. Understandably this article did not provoke a serious debate as all possible measures to stimulate exploration activity seem to have been taken through the DTI/PILOT initiatives, DTI's "Promote" initiative, and also from the taxation angle.

In this issue, under "Talking Point", we have an article, Squaring the Circle: CO2 Sequestration and EOR by Jon Gibbins of Imperial College , who discusses in a qualitative way how the "intermittent" renewables, "flexible" coal power (with CCS) and base load nuclear power might fit into future UK energy policy. He argues that if the case for coal power with CCS cannot be made then the leaning will have to be towards nuclear power to meet the gap. CO2 EOR is expected to play a key role in these deliberations.

We have two articles on the Magnus EOR Project - Magnus Miscible WAG EOR Project by Phil Trussel (BP) and Converting Magnus EOR to CO2: An Unconventional Route to a UK CO2 Capture and Storage Demonstration Project ? by Hannah Chalmers and Jon Gibbins ( Imperial College ). The latter is a study looking at the merits of a radical change in the scheme, by converting from enriched hydrocarbon to CO2, as the miscible injectant. It will be interesting to have BP's (and any other) views on this.

The emphasis is still clearly on high resolution and time-lapse seismic as the key tool that will help unlock more reserves from the UKCS. Olivier Gosselin's article Quantitative Use of Time-Lapse Seismic to Update Reservoir Models (Summary of the Huts Project) outlines how time-lapse seismic features in Total's IOR initiatives.

2003's JIP project proposals that were recommended by the ACHARR committee for support through SHARP funds has three out of the five projects in the seismic area. ACHARR had also recommended calling for JIP proposals in the area of Data Mining for improved reservoir management. However, the proposals received were not of high enough quality to warrant SHARP support, meaning our research providers need to grapple with this a bit more to home in on what is needed here. We would welcome any suggestions in this area. There will be another call for JIP proposals for funding through SHARP and this will be announced in the next issue of the newsletter.

On the data side, there is the article, Reducing Costs and Promoting Activity on the UKCS through the DEAL Data Registry and the National Hydrocarbons Data Archive authored by BGS, CDAL and DTI. This is a useful update on Malcolm Fleming and Jackie Banner's article that was in a previous issue, on the DTI/PILOT initiative to maximise data accessibility.

In closing I would like to thank David Hughes for his untiring efforts in keeping in touch with industry and academia and soliciting all these quality articles, and for constantly looking for improvements to the newsletter. I also thank all the contributors for their time and effort which no doubt comes at a premium these days.

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