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BP new technology to boost British oil recovery

BP have unveiled a new drilling technology which will increase the amount of oil that can be recovered from the largest hydrocarbon resource in the UK.

The Clair Ridge offshore development is the first large-scale oil recovery scheme which uses reduced salinity water injection to extract oil.

Based west of Shetland in Scotland, BP’s £4.5bn scheme will be improved by new facilities for desalination, designed to create lowered salt levels for “waterflooding” from sea water.

New technology worth £75m will significantly increase production to approximately 42m more barrels of oil during the lifetime of the field.

Deep-sea rocks in the oil field were originally thought to have a capacity of 640m barrels of recoverable oil, however the new scheme will add to BP’s expectations.

The firm produces 60% of its resources using waterflooding techniques, which involves injecting salt water into rocks that contain oil to increase the amount that can be produced. Oil is then pushed into wells, 65% of which is often left behind.

BP’s development will allow greater extraction of natural resources that are currently untapped.

Jackie Mutschler, head of upstream technology at BP, explained: “Oil industry wisdom says you shouldn’t inject anything too ‘fresh’ or the clays within the oil-bearing sandstones can swell and reduce the ability of the oil to flow.”

“So BP looked at the fundamental chemistry which makes the oil molecules stick to the rock surfaces in reservoirs.

“What we discovered is that by reducing the salinity, and hence the ionic concentration of the injected water, more molecules of oil could be released from the surface of the grains of the sandstone rock in which they’re held.”

A further offshore scheme in the Gulf of Mexico called “The Mad Dog Phase 2” is the second programme to use low salinity waterflood technology to improve oil recovery.

Oil from the Clair Ridge project is expected to come onstream in 2016, and will have capacity to produce 120,000 barrels of oil a day at its peak.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Miranda Dobson .