NCEDA analysis of IDA World Congress technical sessions
Turning water into oil: Desalination – a process to enhance world oil resources
Author: Dr Dale Williams
Global oil production relies heavily on the injection of water into oil bearing formations to maximise the resource recovery from the oil reserves contained within these reservoirs. Advances in fundamental understanding and oilfield applications have demonstrated that the efficiency of oil recovery in this way is consistently and significantly enhanced by reducing the salinity of the injected water. However the offshore locations of many oil fields and the need to sustain sources of potable quality water in regions of land based oil fields mean that for the oil industry to practically and responsibly produce the additional, valuable energy reserves will require special modifications to conventional techniques to maintain production. The use of desalinated water from sea, brackish or aquifer sources offers a potential new avenue for the industry to pursue.
At a time when the desalination industry has been growing at perhaps the fastest rate since its inception, this oil industry application, presently in its infancy, has the potential to become an additional, but material niche market.
This paper aimed to highlight the existence, nature and extent of the use of desalinated water to improve oil well extraction and to draw attention to the opportunity that it represents to the desalination industry. The author offered a brief explanation of the mechanism and conditions under which low salinity water augments the oil recovery process, and provided insights to the global oil industry’s water injection capacity. This means that it is becoming possible to assess the potential size of this new desalination market.
Descriptions are given of how the desalination process needs to integrate with typical water treatment and injection system designs, and information is presented that summarises the results and conclusions of screening studies completed to identify the desalination technologies most appropriate for this oil industry application.
Finally, Dr Williams gave an overview of status of the oil industry’s full scale implementation of this technology and constraints on oil industry wide application. He identified the key challenges to the uptake of the technology for the implementation of desalination in a large proportion of all new and mature oilfields.
Note: LoSal is trade mark of BP.
