Oman to ‘heat up’ oil wells to boost recovery

Oman is planning to heat up its oil wells in the central and southern areas as part of a new technique designed to maximise hydrocarbon recovery, its main oil operator has said.

The government-controlled Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), which controls the country’s hydrocarbon industry, said it would use what described as a ground-breaking thermal enhanced oil recovery to inject steam into the wells.

“PDO is among the global leaders in implementing thermal enhanced oil recovery technologies. Later this year the company will commence a ground-breaking project to inject steam into the reservoir at Qarn Alam,” PDO said in its bulletin.

“The purpose of the steam is to heat up the oil in the reservoir rock, making it less viscous and thus better able to flow into the producing wells.”

The report said that using thermal EOR, a new technique in the region, would boost the total amount of oil that can be recovered from the reservoir.

“And Qarn Alam is just the start, as there are a number of other fields in PDO’s portfolio that are ideal candidates for such technology, starting with the Amal fields in South Oman,” the company said.

“However, while the rewards from this extra production are immense, so is the requirement for steam – the Qarn Alam project alone requires around 18,000 tonnes of steam per day,” it added.

According to PDO, a small proportion of this steam will come from solar power but the Company added that simply burning precious gas resources to generate the rest of the steam it required would be neither cost-effective nor sustainable.

“The answer to this problem is a technique known as ‘o-generation – capturing waste heat from the gas turbine power generation process and using it to produce steam. PDO needs to continually build new power stations to meet its ever-growing energy needs, and in future these will be equipped with co-generation technology as well as being located close to oilfields that have a steam requirement,” the report said.

“This decision has paved the way for Qarn Alam, Amal and several other potential thermal EOR projects to increase the Company’s total reserves significantly, while saving more than one trillion cubic feet of gas compared with generating the steam as a standalone process. Just as significantly, it will also cut PDO’s carbon footprint by around 20 per cent.”

Oman, which is not an Opec member, controls around 4.5 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Over the past few months, the country has produced around 850,000 bpd of oil.