Offshore staff

ABERDEEN, UK -- Chevron Upstream Europe has commissioned a produced water re-injection pilot plant for its Alba field in the UK northern North Sea.

Construction is under way, and the completed module should start re-injecting water into the reservoir by year-end. The project involves converting an existing seawater injection pump for produced water service. Chevron aims to inject up to one third of Alba's produced water, helping limit environmental discharges.

The pilot scheme will cost over $16.11 million, and has been designed to allow Chevron's engineering, maintenance, and subsurface team to evaluate factors affection injection performance.

In June 2006, the company began deploying Epcon-supplied produced water treatment modules on Alba. The systems have halved the amount of oil in produced water discharged from the platform, but recently, a sandy, oily material has built up in the units. Aside from removing the deposits, an onshore support team has been working to understand the factors causing this process, and they have also examined new ways of cleaning the units with minimal disruption to operations.

08/30/2007