For months now, Oil & Gas Middle East has gone about doing market research for producing the Special Reports and approaching analysts to contribute to it. For the Special Report this month, we decided to tweak the format a bit and host an open discussion about the enhanced oil recovery segment of the market, its prospects, and the opportunities it offers to oilfield services providers.
A number of senior industry professionals expressed interest to participate in the roundtable, and personally for me, it was a pleasure to host these gentlemen and allow them an opportunity to express their views and subject matter expertise. (We will be publishing the video footage of the event on our YouTube channel soon.)
The discussion started with these experts trying to track the advent and growth of the concept of EOR in the regional industry, with some interesting episodes being narrated from the 1970s and 80s, where EOR pilot projects spanned years, and often ended in failure. However, the regional industry could afford to withstand such ‘trial and error’ projects back then, as there was ‘easy oil’ to extract, and those pilot experiments were more about operators preparing for an era when the easy reserves, recoverable through conventional drilling methods, would be gone.
Now, unfortunately, the industry does not have that luxury of affording such ‘hits and misses’ due to a variety of factors, chief among those being the reduced CAPEX budgets of operators, and the fact that EOR is now more of a necessity than an operational choice.
There were intense discussions on each of the EOR methods, namely thermal, chemical, gas-based, water-based, and now solar-powered-steam-based EOR.
While there was unanimity that chemical EOR is arguably the most preferred EOR methodology, other forms of “clean EOR” – such as the type of solar EOR being demonstrated by Glasspoint in its pilot project for PDO, are catching up soon due to their cost-effectiveness aspect.
One thing emerged clear though – enhanced oil recovery will to a great extent replace traditional upstream practices, so companies that already have an offering in that space, have much to gain from.
(Coming up: Read about the opportunities the EOR domain within the oil and gas market has to offer…)
