heavy oil

Upstream separation processes remain a hot topic for facilities engineers. Striving to design separators with the optimal sizing for a variety of reservoir conditions, increasing water cuts, and dynamic gas/oil/water production characteristics is critical, but challenging.

The Papa-Terra field in the Campos basin in Brazil is identified as having an oil interval of 14.6°API in turbidite sandstones.

This feature focuses on the development and trial evaluation of selected new technologies to improve recovery, reduce energy use and environmental impacts, and enhance the overall economics of in-situ extraction of heavy-oil and bitumen resources.

This paper presents a concept for recovery in Canadian oil sands that uses water injection to condition a reservoir interval sufficiently to relieve the overburden stress on the oil sand and increase its porosity and permeability.

To increase the production of a heavy-oil reservoir offshore Congo, a study of DHEH applications has been carried out with encouraging results.

Work conducted in the Surmont field of Alberta, Canada, provided an excellent starting point to optimize flow-control improvements to the SAGD process.

The growing amount of heavy crude processed worldwide has created additional separation challenges, leading some operators to turn to alternative technologies. In some cases, electrocoalescence has been an effective tool to separate oil from water.

As the world's supply of crude becomes heavier, many of the world’s oil producers will have to think more carefully about heavy crudes and the challenges they pose for processing, storage, and transportation.

The steam-assisted-gravity-drainage (SAGD) process along with an efficient steam-use process can reduce production costs and increase the oil-recovery rate. The use of real-time downhole monitoring is an effective approach to achieve this optimization.

At the end of the day, when you are working with heavy oil, the question is how to design your system, including both the layout and the functional aspects of various equipment.