The very first Oil & Gas Middle East Awards held at the Westin in Dubai last night was a well-attended event with many of the industry’s most distinguished companies and personalities getting the rightful praise that they deserve from their peers for a year’s hard work.
Amongst some of the winners were Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) and Drydocks World-Dubai who each received gongs for their excellence and initiatives in enhanced oil recovery and health and safety respectively.
Receiving the ‘Enhanced Hydrocarbon Recovery Project’ award on behalf of PDO was Shell’s technical assurance manager for the MENA region, Barbara Lak, MENA. Shell, along with the government of Oman, Partex and Total is one of the venture partners of PDO.
PDO successfully commissioned its first full-scale enhanced oil recovery project at Marmul this year.
The Marmul Polymer Project, in the south of PDO’s concession area, will add a further 8,000 barrels per day of oil production over the coming years.
This ambitious and novel project involved building a water treatment plant with a capacity of 80,000 cubic metres per day and a polymer preparation and injection facilities station which will have a capacity of 17,500 cubic metres per day.
In her estimation for the reason why PDO was awarded the prestigious accolade, she said that the Omani NOC had made great strides in enhanced oil (EOR) recovery techniques and was pioneering new and innovative EOR methods.
“We won the award because as a partnership we’ve come together and be bold enough to try out a number of different techniques to enhance the oil recovery in this case of various field and in this particular one in Marmul,” she said.
“We’ve done a number of pilots to test various techniques out for this field, the polymer technique turned out to be the most prolific, it’s a new technique of enhanced oil recovery. PDO is the frontrunner in operationalising this new EOR technique and Marmul is one example of that.”
Lak said that the lessons learned from employing the polymer EOR technique would help both Oman and other countries with similar oil extraction scenarios maximise their production output.
“These kinds of techniques will increase the amount [of oil] you’ll get out of these fields, not only for Oman but ultimately for all oilfields in the world. Oman is a pioneer in successfully trying out these new techniques but the repercussions are worldwide.
