Offshore staff
LONDON– An energy industry consortium set up to tackle the challenge of enhancing oil recovery from reservoirs has started with a kick-off meeting for its plan of action.
The €3.9 million ($5.3 million) project named OPTION – Optimizing Oil Production by Novel Technology Integration –is funded by the Danish InnovationsFonden, and is a pioneering collaboration byLloyd’s Register (LR) Energy, LR Senergy (a member of the Lloyd’s Register Group), the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), and Welltec.
Sixteen members of the consortium convened inDenmark, to agree on the strategy for the integration and optimization of reservoir and horizontal well simulation models to meet OPTION’s ultimate aim of enhancing oil production and recovery.
Claus Myllerup, senior vice president of energy technology at LR Energy, said, “The consortium represents a key step forward for OPTION by bringing together expertise from a diverse range of specialist fields and producing a strategy with clear lines of action. As part of this, LR Consulting and LR Senergy will provide improved reservoir modeling techniques that will be critical to the development of the next generation of industry software technologies. These techniques will enhance our ability to understand the critical interface between reservoir inflow and well performance, ultimately improving our decision-making and well design with a focus on enhancing both productivity and reserves.”
Myllerup added that a key element of the rationale for establishing OPTION is the need to improve multi-phase flow modeling from well to separation unit to enable optimization of subsea production equipment.
The first phase in the OPTION initiative marks the beginning of leading global energy services firm Senergy becoming part of the LR Group – as LR Senergy – following LR’s significant investment in the company in September 2013.
LR Senergy, which specializes in providing fully integrated project and asset development services across the international energy industry, will continue to operate as an independent company until 2016, by which time LR will have acquired the balance of its shares. The collaboration expects to see LR Senergy provide a broader service portfolio to the upstream sector of the energy industry, from reservoir to refinery and beyond.
Through OPTION, LR Senergy will deliver its production optimization expertise to bear in modeling the interface between reservoir and wellbore, where current commercial reservoir simulators are known to have shortcomings. LR Senergy’s proprietary Wellscope CFD (computational fluid dynamics) well and near-wellbore modeling process will also be pivotal to the project.
If OPTION is successful, even a 1% increase in oil recovery from Danish fields would represent an estimated value of DKK 60 billion ($11 billion) to the Danish economy.
07/10/2014
