Regulator to speed oil recovery
4 Jul 2014
The UK’s new regulatory body for the oil & gas industry will be given powers to speed up work on the roll-out of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques across the North Sea, it has been confirmed.
Following recommendations by Sir Ian Wood in his review of the UK oil & gas industry, the government last month confirmed a new dedicated regulator would be established.
The EOR Reviews are a series of detailed discussions between DECC and the operators
DECC spokesman
Speaking at Oil & Gas UK’s annual conference in June, chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander confirmed the new body would be called the Oil & Gas Authority and based in Aberdeen.
The search has now begun for a chief executive for the body, with the deadline for applications of 15th July 2014.
As well as recommending that stewardship of the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) should be under a new arm’s length body, funded by industry and better resourced, the Wood Review also states that vital work on EOR should be “processed as a priority”.
To date this work has been carried out by the PILOT Taskforce, a joint government and oil & gas industry group looking at the long term future of UKCS.
Following nearly two years of research and surveying of industry, the PILOT EOR group has identified 14 fields – both operational and in development – suitable for EOR, and has focused on three EOR methods: chemical EOR (including surfactants and polymers), miscible gas injection (both hydrocarbon and CO2) and low salinity water flood.
A Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) spokesman told Process Engineering that following the recommendations of the Wood Review, the Oil & Gas Authority would be given powers to aid the speeding up of EOR roll-out.
“The PILOT EOR programme working on a series of ‘EOR Reviews’ of oil fields with high EOR potential,” said the spokesman.
“The EOR Reviews are a series of detailed discussions between DECC and the operators of these fields to better understand the remaining barriers to EOR project deployment and work out what Government and Industry can do to overcome these barriers in a timely manner. The additional resources available to the new Oil & Gas Authority will enable the pace of these EOR reviews to be accelerated.”
The PILOT Taskforce’s EOR programme began in 2012 following research which found that the theoretical maximum total EOR potential of the UKCS is estimated to be approximately 6 billion boe.
According to the PILOT EOR group’s report on its work so far, published in March, between 10 to 20% of this maximum amount - in the range 0.6 to 1.2 billion boe - could be recovered economically.
There are currently just two operational EOR schemes on the UKCS: BP’s Magnus field, which uses miscible gas injection, and Chevron’s pilot chemical EOR project at its Captain field.
BP’s Clair Ridge field, meanwhile, will in 2017 become the first commercial scale operation in the world to use low salinity water injection.
