What's new in production

	Vol. 227 No. 12
VICTOR SCHMIDT, DRILLING ENGINEERING EDITOR

New surfactant. My first job in the oilpatch was as a physical chemistry lab technician in Getty Oil’s Houston research laboratory. One of my early tasks was to do the tedious testing of new surfactants supplied by chemical companies for possible use in tertiary-recovery, miscible-surfactant waterfloods. Imagine my joy when one day I placed a surfactant solution underneath the coverslip, protecting an oil drop on a microscope slide, and saw the oil streak and bleed away, as the surface tension was broken by the sulfonate surfactant compound. 

A similar effect may be coming to many brownfield operations in the future through the application of some new peptide research. Dr. Anton Middelberg and Dr. Annette Dexter of the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at the University of Queensland, Australia, have developed a switchable peptide surfactant, based on a variant of Lac21, an amphipathic peptide. The chemical technology, dubbed pepfactants, can make and break emulsions and foams. The reaction is repeatable and reversible, using acid or zinc-ion solutions. Pepfactants are expected to bring new functions to many industrial processes and products, especially where biodegradability and product safety are important. This development could mean a lot of new reserves (and profit) for the oil field.

In surfactant-enhanced waterfloods, a surfactant is constantly mixed with produced water and injected into the reservoir. When the mixture returns to the surface, it carries emulsified oil. This emulsion is difficult to break; the breaking process is expensive, energy intensive, and not very efficient. Residual oil concentrations are often high and must be diluted before disposal or being sent downstream with the oil into the refinery. This cost limits the viability of many EOR projects.

A reusable pepfactant could change this reality. Recovered from oil-water-surfactant emulsions, this recyclable pepfactant could reduce the cost and environmental impact from a growing number of tertiary recovery projects. Depending on sweep efficiencies, the peptide-based chemical could help the industry produce the 50 – 70% of the oil held in place by adsorption to the reservoir rock or locked in micropores by surface tension and capillary pressure.

AIBN recently won a $100,000 award from the University of Queensland Business School Enterprise competition to start commercializing this discovery. Dr. Meddelberg and others have formed a company, Pepfactants, to carry this task forward. He says that the production process is expensive at present, so the first applications will likely be in the life sciences. Given the potential for releasing more oil from the earth, a future relationship with the oil industry seems a natural fit. Why should the biologists have all the fun?

Deepwater optical net. BP America Inc. is working with TYCO Telecommunications to build an undersea fiber optic system in the Gulf of Mexico. The 800-mi light fiber will connect all of BP’s offshore facilities, bringing them continuous broadband service. Seven of the company’s deepwater facilities – Atlantis, Holstein, Horn Mountain, Mad Dog, Marlin, Na Kika and Thunder Horse – will be connected by the system to Advanced Collaborative Environment centers in Houston.

This connectivity is part of a longer-term strategy to help deepwater facilities produce longer and give the company operational flexibility, delaying or avoiding hurricane-related shutdowns. Optical signals will be sent to Houston by two different paths for redundancy during hurricanes.

The system will support up to 64 platforms and will have extra bandwidth for contract to other deepwater operators. The system should be operational this time next year.

Seafloor power. A few years back, this journal reported on the Ocean Sediment Carbon Aerobic Reactor (OSCAR), p. 25, World Oil, Jan. 2002. OSCAR is a way to produce power on the seafloor by exploiting a natural voltage difference created by a pair of chemical reactions used by microbes in seafloor sediment. The amount of power is small, but it can be produced continually.

Argentinian researchers have now put that concept to use for corrosion control. Dr. Juan Pablo Busalmen and his colleagues at the National University of Mar del Plata recognized that steady, microbial-generated energy could overcome the natural galvanic corrosion of fixed, steel offshore structures. They wired graphite electrode rods to stainless steel plates partly immersed in seawater and pushed the rods into the ocean’s mud. The electricity produced from the chemical reactions in the seabed prevented the normal electron-scavenger, oxygen, from corroding the steel. This is another concept that could provide significant cost savings for existing and future fixed offshore structures. 

Meanwhile, researchers at the Laboratory of Microbial Ecology and Technology (LabMET), Ghent University, Belgium, have extended the work on microbial fuel cells by preparing stacks of test cells and gauging the power output. They found that energy-producing cells can be placed in series or parallel circuits for either higher voltage or higher wattage. They also found that different microbial communities can produce different levels of usable power.

Perhaps corrosion of seabed structures and even moored facilities will be controlled by microbial power in the near future. So long to sacrificial zinc anodes, hello microbe power!

New production. CNOOC Ltd brought Caofeidian (CFD) 11-6 and 12-1S fields onstream. The fields are in Bohai Bay Blocks 04/36 and 05/36, are unitized and share production facilities with the CFD 11-1/11-2 fields. Crude produced from the fields will be transported to the Hai Yang Shi You 112 FPSO through a 13-km pipeline. The fields will produce 15,000 bopd from 10 wells with peak production near 6 million bbl per year.

Norsk Hydro began production from Fram Øst in the North Sea. The new field is in the Norwegian sector near Troll and is tied back to Troll C platform, operated by the company. It is producing from two subsea production templates, and will eventually have five production wells and two water injection wells in operation. Troll C’s produced water will provide pressure support for the reservoir, while gas from Fram Vest will drive gas lift to increase field recovery.

The field was discovered in 1990 and holds 61 million bbl of oil and 109.5 Bcf of gas in several geological structures. The new field is expected to add 50,000 bopd of production at its peak in 2008.