How can innovation and technology help make the most of existing energy resources?

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The world's demand for energy continues to grow due to population growth and improving standards of living.  At the same time, the days of "easy oil and gas" are over. To complement the drive to extract new resources in increasingly challenging environments it is also important to ensure that existing reservoirs yield their full potential. Why are Shell's enhanced oil recovery techniques a viable solution?

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The days of “easy oil and gas” are over. New technologies are required to meet the world’s growing demand for energy.

The International Energy Agency recognises that fossil fuels must continue to meet the bulk of demand for many years to come. To date, the focus has been to discover new resources from increasingly challenging reservoirs and locations. Existing reservoirs typically yield only 30-35% of their potential and at Shell we have developed enhanced oil recovery techniques to extract up to 20% additional yield from light oilfields and 80% for heavy oil. This offers huge potential for our energy future.

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Closed October 13th
hespian
Tuesday, 27th September 2011 11.40
How does a "new entrant" break into the established supply chain that dominates this market? We have an innovative technology incorporated in an intelligent product that will deliver significant benefits to the operators as they attempt to meet the challenges of attaining optimum yield from their assets. The barriers to entry are formidable for innovative technology businesses and the industry does miss out on the application of next generation solutions. Our biggest task is getting any operator to embrace our product and facilitate the first installations - installations that we need to provide the base reference sites and prove its worth.
Vinay
Saturday, 1st October 2011 18.21
I believe that if we have a sound new technology then it may not face any problem in entering, and even dominating the market soon. A sound new technology should fulfill these requirements: 1. It should help to enhanced recovery in comparison to the recovery from the commonly utilized technique(s). 2. Its cost should have to be either similar or even lower in comparison to other techniques. 3. If its cost is comparatively higher than the present commonly utilized technique then we may need to compare their overall enhanced recovery to cost ratio with each others.
SeanMGonzalez
Monday, 3rd October 2011 15.06
I agree that it is a formidable challenge to enter this market, whether you have the right technology or not. One section of these Shell forums I noticed are unavailable is local events, possibly with representatives from Shell, which would provide excellent networking opportunities. I was hoping that these forums might provide key contacts and conversations where we could offer our capabilities. Willcor specializes in reliability, ruggedizing components and systems during product development and eliminating product variability through transition to full production. One of the most costly and time consuming aspects of oil production is managing mean time between operational availability of systems, and extending operational time increases oil production rate.
Bhavadip
Tuesday, 27th September 2011 11.57
I doubt that Majority of National Oil companies are achieving 30-35% recovery from in-place reservoirs. The value is less than that. EOR is some thing higher level of technology. As you said that additional 20 - 30 % recovery can be achieved by EOR. I defer with a positive objective that if initially, any new field is managed with a pure objective of BUSINESS by technocrates only, Initially recovery will not only towards higher percentage but it will make your EOR program easy and systematic. Concept of Synergetic is failed every where. If you make a banker as a CEO of oil & gas company, his / her objective will be different than a Petroleum Engineer / Geologist is a CEO of an O & G company. Recently, I have attended a peer review by Shell in my company. Reservoir engineer having 5 - 7 years of experience was talking about EOR for my fields / asset. I was surprised about his conclusion or even he was not having primary knowledge of EOR. Need Project Manager who should be Eng & MBA.
Lane John
Wednesday, 28th September 2011 02.09
Its all very well to extract additional production from reservoirs, what about the infra-structure modifications or indeed new infra-structure to process and transport this additional product to market. I also note that that in the coming years where will the Oil & Gas Engineering Talent come from, maybe an XL spreadsheet that one ticks off the work completed? Just my thoughts here on the future of engineering.
FOG
Wednesday, 28th September 2011 09.42
Hello john, your comments are well directed. If it was easy to extract additional production from existing resevoirs this forum would not exist. Oil production globally is difficult sustain - gas supplies not so bad. Many pipelines for oil are under capacity but don't generally support gas transport - however most gas pipelines can be used to transport oil. if additional oil can be sourced, it could potentially be transported in gas pipelines. This could potentially assist with infa structure in the short term. one million scf of natural gas = 172 barrels of crude oil. Of course another shortfall is people and skills. I heard recently that the average age of an oil field worker is now 52 years old, it seems that oil is not the only declining resource.
fougeres88
Wednesday, 28th September 2011 02.38
I am aware of a technology called Passive Monitoring offered by a company in Switzerland called Marmot, and I know the team that are there. Their technology detects underground hydrocarbons by a unique method of listening to the earth's own sounds (hence the term "passive") and, in combination with structural information from seismic and/or well data, it can under many conditions give a direct indication of the presence of hydrocarbons beneath the detector, which is simple to reply and cheap. I have seen the way if has been used and has been shown to be able to pin-point accumulations at the early exploration stage or during production. In the latter case its use points the way towards enhancing oil and gas recovery by being able to detect real time the presence of oil and gas, showing missed or bypassed accumulations etc. Why does Shell not at least give this a try? I am aware that the technology has been presented to Shell but there were apparently no takers?
Shell
Friday, 30th September 2011 16.28
Hi fougeres, thank you very much for the hint. We are indeed aware of the passive seismic technology and it is an integral part of our R&D program. We fully agree that using natural seismic events might be an elegant way to get a better understanding of the earth’s subsurface.
Vinay
Saturday, 1st October 2011 18.40
Hi Fougeres and Hi Shell, I agree with you all. I would like to say here that understanding and recognizing subsurface hydrocarbon is one aspect and its complete recovery is another aspect. At present we have many small oil discoveries all over the world but it is not exploitable due to the higher cost of recovery. So our thrust in R & D should be two fold: 1. Developing new enhanced recovery techniques to increase overall recovery from 50-70% to 90% and more. 2. Developing low cost drilling and enhanced recovery techniques to bring in all small scale oil discoveries into a commercially feasible projects.
CDB
Wednesday, 28th September 2011 12.48
To what extent does Shell believe it can combine EOR with CCS related technologies, for example using CO2 as the sweep mechanism? Can EOR actually kill two birds with the one stone?