Within the Oil Industry, it is a well known fact that the percentage of recovery from known oil reserves lies between 30 and 35 percent. Enhanced recovery is a method which utilizes new scientific techniques that aim at the increase of the recovered percentage of oil, so that the general national re-serves may be increased.
A Sketch Showing a Gas Injection Well & a Production Well
Since 1981,20 studies have been performed on various oil fields in SPLAJ. These studies have shown the possibility of raising the total recovery from 35 to 60 percent through enhanced recovery methods, thus increasing the amount of the general recoverable reserves by the same rate .
The enhanced recovery methods used in the current studies involve the injection of natural gases or carbon dioxin (CO2). This involves highly sophisticated technologies, and require exorbitant investments, and a lot of time. Therefore, the decision to implement such projects requires the undertaking of several technical and economical studies, as well as many laboratory and field experiments in order to ascertain their economic feasibility.
NOC and its affiliated companies, have therefore started to make plans and multi-phased programmes in order to complete all possible and necessary, studies before embarking upon actual implementation.
