For Abu Dhabi, research and development (R&D) provides an opportunity to facilitate the country’s transition from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a knowledge-based one and Abu Dhabi’s decision makers know that partnership and collaboration between companies and academia is key to R&D success. To enable that process, the government launched two major institutes for conducting research that emphasizes local energy issues—the Petroleum Institute University and Research Center in 2001, and the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (Masdar) in 2006. This was followed by the inauguration of the Takreer Research Centre with a focus on the refining sector in 2009.
Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and its subsidiaries have launched a program to become a leader in R&D projects of local interest, such as CO2enhanced oil recovery (EOR), clean technologies, and a goal of a 70% enhanced recovery rate, which has not been achieved anywhere in the world, in addition to improving safety and efficiency. So far, ADNOC has created a new R&D department adopting a clearer definition of its goals and activities.
In addition, the company sees 2015 as the year to reap the benefits from its ongoing R&D activities, despite the fall in oil prices. “Starting from 2015, ADNOC and its subsidiaries will start producing 2% of its output (70,000–80,000 BOPD) using the research it conducted over the last 10 years,” said Ali Rashid Al Jarwan, chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi Marine Operating Company, in his opening speech during the third Abu Dhabi International Research & Development Academic Conference & Exhibition.
Abu Dhabi plans to invest USD 70 billion in its oil and gas sector over the next decade, while increasing crude production capacity to 3.5 million BOPD from less than 3 million BOPD. Some of this production will come from technically more demanding fields.
The Masdar Institute, the government-owned research university, and ADNOC are trying to increase R&D innovation as well. Over the past few years, ADNOC has increased R&D spending as it tapped production from more complex fields, such as the Shah gas field, tight reservoirs, and tar formations. Several CO2 EOR projects are under way. These R&D projects are being conducted either with local companies or with major international oil companies, and global leading universities.
Focus on CO2 for EOR
As the government launched aggressive initiatives to tackle the issue of greenhouse emissions, Masdar started several R&D projects aiming to find ways to reduce the UAE’s carbon footprint.
One of the ongoing studies is being conducted on a heterogeneous, low-dipping, and low-permeability carbonate oil reservoir. The required CO2 is captured from the local steel plant, Emirates Steel Industries, as part of a large-scale carbon capture and injection project. The project entails capturing, dehydrating, compressing, and transporting the CO2 to Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Oil Operations’ (ADCO) onshore fields for sequestration and/or EOR processes. Due for completion by 2016, the project will sequester up to 800,000 tons of CO2 annually.
Going forward, the challenge will be to make carbon capture, use, and storage projects both commercially viable and attractive to invest in. To this end, the joint venture between ADNOC and Masdar will create a benchmark for the technical and commercial delivery of CO2.
Once CO2 EOR is proved to be feasible in Abu Dhabi fields, the potential CO2demand from ADNOC’s operations may rise on the back of expanding oil production in the future, and Abu Dhabi will thus create a commercial playing field that will enable other companies, project developers, and investors to enter the market on a commercial basis.
Digital Rock Physics Project
In January, France’s Total and ADNOC joined forces to map the region’s carbonate reservoirs, marking the first R&D collaboration between the two companies. The Digital Rock Physics (DRP) project will pool the technical resources and expertise of the Masdar Institute and Abu Dhabi’s Petroleum Institute. The aim of this project is to learn more about the carbonate formations so that ADNOC and others can make better predictions on the ease or difficulty of extracting oil and gas, which will ultimately cut costs and maximize recovery rates.
The study also aims to demonstrate if it is possible to use DRP as a future tool for generating accurate, fast, and cost-effective special core-analysis properties to support reservoir characterization and simulation tools on carbonate fields. In other words, can DRP be a reliable tool for reservoir engineering, and what are the limitations especially for carbonates?
“The project aims to start a DRP research and development program in UAE to build a state-of-the-art imaging, rock testing, and simulation environment (hardware/software) to provide a 3D multiscale and geo-referenced rock images and rock properties database,” said Cyril Caubit, senior reservoir R&D adviser at Total E&P UAE.
More precisely, the project will determine petrophysical properties from 3D images on carbonates derived from micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) and focused ion beam scanning electron microscopes. Caubit said that two axes will be studied in this project:
Flow properties (static and dynamic). Porosity, permeability, and relative permeability. The team will focus first on porosity and permeability rather than relative permeability because of wettability issues, which are not completely understood at the pore scale.
Elastics properties. Acoustic velocity, elastic moduli, etc. To perform a rigorous study, the project will define an experimental work based on two devices:
- The micro-CT and core flooding located in the Petroleum Institute, which will be available in the fourth quarter of 2015.
- A trial-axial cell for elastics properties, located in the Masdar Institute, which is already available.
“This set of experimental data acquired with these two devices will be our reference to calibrate our DRP simulator,” Caubit said. “As you know, carbonates can be highly heterogeneous; therefore, the main challenge for the DRP is to take into consideration the multiscale characteristic of the rock and its impacts on the properties mentioned earlier, from microscale to macroscale.”
The project has been designed as an “open laboratory” to encourage knowledge transfer through the acquisition and analysis of rock data from all over the world.
Caubit said that the new items included in the DRP project are the algorithm of image analysis and properties extrapolation, which include the following:
- Gray-scale segmentation based on connected component: The algorithm is based on the connectedness/uniqueness of the matrix, where the objective is to determine automatically the right threshold to distinguish between the matrix and pores.
“One question remains: How to resolve pores below the image resolution?” Caubit said.
- Textural analysis and classification: Defining textural attributes based on gray scale and connected component to obtain an objective basis for rock typing at the plug scale.
“This point is very important to define the region on plug where we want to zoom to acquire more information by increasing the resolution.”
- Properties extrapolation by neural network learning methods: Defining a relationship between the textural attribute (rock type at the plug scale) and the petrophysical properties simulated by DRP simulation on a smaller scale.
“When the relationship is learned theoretically, is it possible to use it for other plugs without performing the DRP simulation at the smaller scale?
“Currently, we are coding and testing all these algorithms to assess their reliability for our application on carbonates. We are hoping to obtain results in terms of porosity, rock typing, and properties extrapolation,” Caubit said.
The project has been validated by Abu Dhabi’s Oil Sub Committee (OSC) in terms of budget for 3 years, and will be jointly funded by Total and ADNOC (50/50). “For us it will be success if we manage to simulate properties at the plug scale, which are in line with the experimental data at the end of the 3 years of project defined by the OSC,” he said.
The ultimate goals of this project are to replace the routine conventional core analysis, such as porosity and permeability for a limited range of core (limit in terms of porosity and permeability have to be defined), define reliable techniques for upscaling adapted to heterogeneous carbonates to provide data for reservoir engineering, and define a model of wettability at the pore scale based on micro-CT observation. This is the crucial point for dynamic data like relative permeability.
“These three points are very important but it clearly is not accessible today on carbonates,” he said.
Accelerating Innovation
To successfully implement its R&D agenda, Abu Dhabi should focus on education and partnerships, which can accelerate innovation. “Human issue is key to making R&D a reality in the UAE,” said Alain Goulois, ex-vice president of R&D Exploration & Production at Total. “They need to encourage high education up to PhD level, encourage operated R&D in the UAE, and also adopt a favorable environment fostering R&D,” said Goulois who retired end of 2014.
In the short term, global and local partnership must contribute to this initiative. “Training individuals within teams, with hands-on responsibilities and on site are critical for the country to achieve its objective,” he said.
In order to speed up technological innovation, Goulois suggested that companies need to consider the move that defense industries have gone through over the past decade, which involves the switch from a very secretive approach to low technology-readiness-level issues and make the data available for the world community to use as reference, benchmark, or case studies. “Attracting the attention of the international community on UAE topics through ‘open labs’ could also help in accelerating innovation in the country,” he added.