Society of Petroleum
Engineers (SPE) coordinates 14 regional Student Paper Contests (SPC) at the
undergraduate, master's, and PhD level. Students compete against other students
from their region for the opportunity to advance to the International Student
Paper Contest, held during the Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition
(ATCE). Contestants enter with an abstract of their paper, of which they
perform a presentation on the day of the competition, and then the victors who
proceed to the International contest at ATCE have their papers published in the
conference proceedings and on Onepetro.
The UK annual SPC
was last held in November 2014 at Imperial College London where petroleum
engineering students from all around the UK had gathered to present their
dissertation work at Masters Level.
The work presented
by Arash Farhadi, who at the time was a student at London South Bank
University, was a feasibility study on Offshore Polymer Flooding, Forecasting
production through Integrated Asset Modelling, A Technical and Economic
Approach. The objectives of this work was to investigate how capital efficient
such offshore projects can be and whether they can be rewarding in terms of
economics.
The dissertation was completed under the supervision
of Consultant reservoir engineers Alejandro Primera and Jesus Aponte from
Primera Reservoir Ltd. The supervision provided by Primera Reservoir
covered areas of reservoir simulation modelling, Integrated Asset Modelling
(IAM), uncertainty and risk analysis and the economic evaluation.
The judges voted the work as the winner of the UK SPC
2014 and was therefore invited to present at the European SPC in June 2015. Subsequently,
earlier this month Arash Farhadi, who is now part of the staff at Primera
reservoir specialized in line of Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery (CEOR),
presented the topic at the European SPC in Budapest where it was subject to positive
feedback from the delegates at the event.
The main challenges
in regards to implementation and evaluation of this project were the following:
Surface Facilities
- Space and weight limitations
- Storage tanks and mixing facilities
- Water treatment facilities
- logistics
Technical
Challenge
•
Modelling the
uncertainties associated with polymer performance and flooding
•
Polymer
performance under various conditions
Incremental
Operational and Capital Expenditures
•
Incremental
CAPEX and OPEX for the Surface facilities required
•
Polymer price
•
Oil Price
Workflow
The following workflow was put into place to address challenges associated :
Since
then the path taken by Primera Reservoir in pursue of further research around CEOR
has expanded. We are now in collaboration with universities from all around the
UK and offer our supervision on the final year and Master’s level dissertations
focused on CEOR. In the year 2015, we have supervised 5 students at both
undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The students will be competing in the
2015 UK SPC in the coming months.
Strong focus on decision making and uncertainty analysis combined with advanced, state of the art and complex workflows.