Point McIntyre enhanced oil recovery to begin this year

Alternating water, miscible injectant expected to produce 32 million barrels of incremental oil; EOR flow to peak in 2006

Kristen Nelson

PNA News Editor

With final installation scheduled for later this year, the $44 million Point McIntyre enhanced oil recovery project will produce first results in 12 to 18 months, with enhanced oil recovery output expected to peak in 2006. The project will increase ultimate Point McIntyre oil recovery by more than 32 million barrels and add production of 5,000 barrels of oil per day by 2006.

ARCO Alaska, which has a 30 percent interest, is managing the project on behalf of the Point McIntyre owners. Exxon Company USA has a 38 percent interest and BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. has a 32 percent interest.

In a May 6 interview, Kris Fuhr, ARCO Alaska operations superintendent for the Greater Point McIntyre area, told PNA that the project “is a good thing for us operationally.”

Fuhr said the project is essentially a Prudhoe Bay central gas facility in miniature.

“Our process is almost identical to CGF’s only the scale is a tenth, about a tenth the size.”

The Prudhoe Bay central gas facility currently can make 70,000 barrels of natural gas liquids and 500 million cubic feet of miscible injectant, he said.

“When we’re done we’re going to make 4,500 barrels of NGLs, about 50 million cubic feet of miscible injectant. So to give you a sense of scale. But the process is damn near identical.”

Completion this year

The pipeline is complete, said Raymond Eastlack, Point McIntyre EOR project leader. Eastlack, an ARCO Alaska engineer, is with Shared Services Engineering, which is in charge until ARCO takes custody on behalf of the owners.

The 63,000 foot 8-inch diameter line, installed on existing vertical support members, will take miscible injectant from the Lisburne production center to the two Point McIntyre drill sites for injection.

Lisburne has a natural gas liquids plant, Fuhr said, with the same process as the central gas facility at Prudhoe Bay, but the Lisburne plant makes only NGLs while the Prudhoe plant makes both NGLs and miscible injectant. All of the gas that remains after making NGLs is turned into miscible injectant at Prudhoe Bay’s central gas facility but has been reinjected at Lisburne.

There are components in the gas being reinjected at Lisburne which are suitable for miscible injectant, and the project under way now will make the “process changes to capture those components and turn that into a miscible injectant stream,” Fuhr said.

Point McIntyre a waterflood area

“When we start the EOR project,” he said, “we’ll start alternating injecting solvent in some injection wells and then alternating that with water behind it… so it’s kind of an alternating process of solvent then water then solvent then water.”

Fuhr said some benefits are expected from the EOR flood 12 to 18 months after injection begins. “And as you continue to get more and more of this solvent volume into the reservoir, the response starts ramping up.” 2006 is when the peak response is expected from the project.

The result of the EOR project is incremental production, Fuhr said, “production that we wouldn’t have made if we hadn’t done the project.”

Water is injected to keep pressure up in the reservoir as oil is produced, Fuhr said. But water is heavier than oil and it drops toward the bottom of the reservoir as it is injected — it pushes oil toward producing wells, but because it is sinking as it moves through the reservoir, there are areas higher up that it never reaches.

“What miscible injectant does is exactly the opposite,” he said. Miscible injectant is a gas, and when you put it in the reservoir it tends to move up, putting it into contact with the oil that the waterflood didn’t contact.

There was some concern expressed by both state agencies and ARCO’s partners about the continuation of NGL production, Eastlack said. With NGL production, he said, “you’re trying to capture butanes and heavier; you’ll have very little propane. Conversely,” he said, “the propane is what we’re really trying to capture …to make our solvent.”

“We designed this project with our ability to maximize NGLs to the amount we can blend into our crude and then what’s left over is what we’re going to work to make our MIs with…,” Eastlack said.

Since production processed through the Lisburne production center (from the Point McIntyre, Niakuk and Lisburne fields) is on decline, and since the amount of NGL you can blend into crude oil is a function of how much crude you have, “what we are going to see with time is as our crude rates go down, our NGL rates are going to go down because we don’t have as much crude to stabilize NGLs and that relationship, that’s just physics,” he said.

NGL plant down

“That work is mostly installing time for the additional pipe — cutting into existing lines, putting in a T and valves so we can just bolt up in September when the machine gets there,” said Fuhr.