UWI
professor suggests carbon dioxide oil recovery
methods in Trinidad
Trinidad Express
Petroleumworldtt.com
03 30 08
As global warming continues to be one of the planet's
foremost environmental issues, a University of
the West Indies lecturer has recommended that Government
look into the use of Carbon Dioxide oil recovery
methods.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main fuel of the Green
House Gas (GHG) effect that scientists worldwide
say is responsible for an accelerated climate change.
Trinidad and Tobago ranks 10th in the world for
CO2 emissions per capita.
UWI's
Petroleum Engineering senior lecturer Clyde Abder
was speaking during a two-day
workshop at
the Hilton Trinidad last month, which explored
the possibilities and implications of developing
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) activities in
T&T.
Particular emphasis was placed on Enhanced Oil
Recovery (EOR).
"Certainly we should have been using carbon
dioxide oil recovery a long time ago," he
said.
"If
we are about to get started in it, better late
than never. We can certainly
recover several
hundred million barrels of additional oil and raise
land production rates and certainly offshore production
rates by very substantial quantities.
"It
is very rare that we have the opportunity to
do well and to do good at
the same time. This
is one of those opportunities and we should certainly
seize that."
Abder has done extensive research in Carbon Dioxide
oil recovery methods, testing it himself back in
the 80s and 90s.
During that time Forest Reserve held a supply
of carbon dioxide.
"At that time the industry was still new
in the trial of carbon dioxide so we did not know
a whole lot about it, so I could only use what
were then marginal wells," he explained.
"Since
then the industry has tried it in better productive
wells with very
similar results
in terms of increasing production rates and increasing
total recoveries.
"Our
trials were really bootleg trials and not the
best candidates. We did not
select candidates.
We took the candidates, which were available. If
we were to do that now, we certainly would be a
lot more judicious in the candidates we would select
and we would select our best candidates first.
"If
you increase productions rate from five barrels
a day to 20 barrels that
would be significant
for a small operator but if you increase production
to 50 that is great production for almost any operator
particularly operators on land. So we can see we
can do a better job now selecting our candidates,
given the fact that we've tested the process and
the process is known to work not only here but
everyone else that it has been tried."
He then described the Huff and Puff process of
Carbon Dioxide oil recovery.
"Huff and puff is a process in which we inject
a fluid, in our case carbon dioxide into a well
in some tailored quantity and we allow that tailored
volume to soak for a period of time. Then you produce
the well at the end of that time," Abder explained.
"It
has several advantages in the production of wells,
in that, wells that
are dead are back
either flowing or producing. It is able to do this
because the CO2 has several advantages: it lowers
the viscosity of the oil, it swells the oil in
place and it cleans the oil well area. All of these
contribute to increasing production rates of the
order of two to five times the pre injection rates.
It also helps you to produce wells that are marginal
or previously uneconomic."
He said at least 60 per cent of the Carbon Dioxide
injected is retained in the well.
"So that is one way of getting rid of the
Carbon Dioxide," Abder said.
"You
inject it into the reservoir and some of it naturally
stays there. Some of
it actually
helps you to produce more oil and to produce the
oil faster.
"Also
at the end of a productive life of a reservoir,
when you cap those wells
and close
down that reservoir that CO2 is more likely to
stay underground for hundreds of years."
Next week we deal with Carbon Capturing and its
cost.
Story by
Kristy Ramnarine from
The Trinidad Express
The
Trinidad Express
Wednesday, March 26th 2008
Copyright© 2008
respective author or news agency. All rights
reserved.
We welcome the use of Petroleumworld™ stories
by anyone provided it mentions Petroleumworld.com
as the source. Other stories you have to get authorization
by its authors.
