New Extreme Oil and Gas in Denmark
With dwindling easily accessible oil and gas resources, more and more exploration and production activities are shifted to technically challenging environments such as unconventional resources and deeper formations. Deeper reservoirs mean higher temperatures and pressures and those above 150 oC and 700 bar are classified as high pressure high temperature (HP/HT) reservoirs. Many of the HP/HT reservoirs are found offshore, including in the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Development of HP/HT reservoirs are risky but could be highly rewarding if it turns out to be successful. The NextOil project aims to reduce the technical and economic risks in developing HP /HT reservoirs through three work packages:
WP 1: Rock mechanics. In order to address the challenges associated with well safety, well life and the narrow drilling windows, methods will be developed to determine how the effective stress field responds to changes in pore pressure under the extreme HP/HT conditions. Through rock mechanics tests and rock physics measurements and modeling, the dependency of the effective stress coefficient on stress and temperature will be established.
WP 2: Hydrocarbon reservoir fluid. Physical properties and phase equilibrium data for model and reservoir fluids at HP/HT conditions will be measured on a recently established HP/HT PVT system. Advanced EoS will be tested and further improved for a better description of HP/HT reservoir fluids. The combined experimental and modeling effort will provide a more solid basis for estimating the resources and for forecasting the production in HP/HT reservoirs.
WP 3: Scaling. Water evaporation due to pressure drop can lead to precipitation of salts from the formation brine or scaling. It can be difficult to inject inhibitors for HP/HT reservoirs and thus scaling prediction becomes a crucial issue. The extended UNIQUAC model will be applied to modeling the HP/HT scaling problems. Experimental measurement will be performed to supplement the scarce data in the literature. In addition, the reverse Joule-Thomson effects will be studied in WP2 and WP3.
The project is sponsored by the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation (DNATF/HTF), DONG E&P and Maersk Oil and runs from November 2012 to October 2016.
Head of project:Prof: Prof. Erling H.Stenby, ehst@kemi.dtu.dk
WP leader: Prof. Ida Fabricius, ilfa@byg.dtu.dk
WP leader: Project Manager: Wei Yan, weya@kemi.dtu.dk
WP leader: Assoc. Prof. Kaj Thomsen, kth@kt.dtu.dk
WP leader: Ass. Prof. Katrine Alling Andreassen, kall@byg.dtu.dk
Post Doc: Teresa Regueira, tere@kemi.dtu.dk
PhD student: Carolina Figueroa, difm@kt.dtu.dk
PhD student: Farhad Varzandeh, farvar@kemi.dtu.dk
PhD student: Tobias Orlander, tobor@byg.dtu.dk