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Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry
April 2014

Vol. 19, No. 16 Week of April 20, 2014

BP continuing to evaluate heavy oil

BP is continuing an engineering analysis as part of an evaluation of the eventual possibility of producing heavy oil from Alaska’s North Slope, Frank Paskvan, the company’s Alaska technology manager, told the Alaska Senate Resource committee on April 9 in answer to a question about the North Slope’s heavy oil resources.

Between April 2011 and July 2013 the company experimented with the production of heavy oil from the Ugnu formation, a relatively shallow heavy oil reservoir rock unit, using a $100 million test facility on S-pad in the Milne Point field.

Those tests demonstrated technical and economic challenges for heavy oil development, Paskvan said.

Heavy oil has a thick, syrupy consistency and is too viscous for unaided transportation through an oil pipeline. Because of its high viscosity, the material is very challenging, and potentially expensive, to extract from a reservoir rock. And, to add to the economic challenges, this type of oil has less market value than conventional light oil.

But with an estimated 12 billion to 18 billion barrels of heavy oil lying undeveloped under the North Slope, this resource could perhaps help turn around the decline in North Slope oil production.

CHOPS technique

BP used a technique called cold heavy oil production with sand, or CHOPS, for its heavy oil production tests. The technique involves using an augur-like progressive cavity pump near the bottom of a well, to reduce the down-hole pressure in the well, suck oil into the well bore from the typically unconsolidated sand reservoir and send a slurry of sand and oil up the well bore to the surface. On the surface the sand is separated from the oil in a specially designed settling tank.

Apparently the production tests were successful, with oil production reaching levels as high as 500 barrels per day.

Unfortunately, however, the Achilles heel of the process is a rotating rod that runs down the well from a motor at the surface to drive the pump rotor deep in the well. During testing, the spinning of this rod, with metal-to-metal contact between the rod and the well casing, and with abrasive sand in the well, rapidly wore holes in the casing, Paskvan explained. The resulting need for frequent well repairs undermined the already fragile economics of the process.

“So we’re doing studies now on artificial lift and hope that will improve the run life, because these workovers and tubing replacements were very expensive and made it difficult to continue the operations of the pilot,” Paskvan said.

—Alan Bailey






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