Offshore staff
SUNBURY, UK – BP has started operating what it claims to be the world’s first robotic coreflooding system.
Coreflooding is used to identify and evaluateenhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies. It measures the effectiveness of water or gas injected into an oil-bearing rock sample to displace oil. The results can be used to assess the potential for water flooding in an oil field.
Ahmed Hashmi, BP’s head of upstream technology, said the new Core Flood Robot would “hugely improve the speed and efficiency with
which we can deploy new technologies to recover more oil from reservoirs.”
BP’s large-scale in-house coreflooding laboratory in the UK allows reservoir samples to be tested at high-pressure and temperature reservoir conditions, and to evaluate different reservoir types.
The new robotic system operates around the clock, seven days a week.
The system’s automation/work-flow optimization enables hundreds of coreflood tests to be performed annually rather than the dozens feasible previously, the company says. This should at least halve the time spent developing new technologies, BP adds.
The same team that developed LoSal EOR, BP’s reduced salinity waterflooding technique that is under deployment on the Clair Ridge project west of Shetland, is responsible for the new system.
11/11/2014
