A ground-breaking energy industry research project aimed at addressing the key challenge of enhancing oil recovery from reservoirs has been launched.
The €4million project (approx. £3.4 million) is a pioneering collaboration by Lloyd’s Register Energy, Senergy, the Danish Technical University and Welltec.
It is being funded by the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation and will focus on optimising oil production from horizontal wells.
Entitled Project OPTION, the initiative aims to align existing reservoir simulation models with high-performance inflow and wellbore flow simulators. Lloyd's Register Consulting and Senergy will provide improved reservoir modelling techniques, which will be critical to the development of the next generation of industry software technologies. The increased understanding of the interface between reservoir and well performance will improve well and completion design to enhance productivity and oil recovery.
If successful, even a 1% increase in oil recovery from Danish fields would represent an estimated value of DKK 60 billion (approx. €8 billion / £6.8 billion) to the Danish economy.
Claus Myllerup, Senior Vice President Technology at Lloyd’s Register Energy said: “We are delighted to have been awarded funding from the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation as the research and techniques within this project will become central for the ability to improve predictions of reservoir recovery rates. Project OPTION will be central to our ability to improve the prediction of the recovery factor and thereby assist our clients to assess measures that must be implemented to optimise recovery. The project will clearly strengthen the expansion of our Danish business in the global market.”
Dr Iain Morrison, VP Technical at Senergy said: “We are excited by this award and the potential which the collaboration will offer to improving decision-making and enhancing recovery factors. Senergy will bring its industry-leading Production Optimisation expertise to bear in modelling the interface between reservoir and wellbore, where current commercial reservoir simulators are known to have significant shortcomings. Senergy’s innovative CFD (computational fluid dynamics) well and near-wellbore modelling process, Wellscope is integral to the OPTION project.”
The project marks one of the first significant collaborations between Lloyd’s Register Energy and Senergy, since Lloyd’s Register’s investment in the energy services company in September 2013.
