BP injecting recycled water to help meet Iraq’s injection challenge

15 October 2018
UK oil major is in the midst of a 12-month pilot project testing the feasibility of using recycled water

UK oil major BP is in the midst of a 12-month pilot project testing the feasibility of using recycled water produced at the Rumaila oil field to maintain pressure at the giant reservoir, but Iraq will need ever increasing volumes if it is to meet its targets.

Early results from the pilot have been promising, according to Zaid Elyaseri, BP’s Iraq country manager, who was speaking at the CWC Basra Megaprojects conference in Istanbul on 9 October.

BP has to deal with significant quantities of water from each producing oil well at Rumaila. The crude is treated at a degassing station, where water, salts and associated gas are stripped out. Previously the water would have been disposed of, but now it is sent to a cluster manifold system and piped into three injector wells.

The company has so far injected 30,000 barrels of water produced from the field, resulting in an extra 8,000 barrels of oil coming out of the ground.

Rumaila, the country's largest producing field, is operated by BP under a technical service contract awarded in 2009 with PetroChina. The partners initially signed a contract targeting peak production of 2.85 million barrels a day (b/d), subsequently lowered to 2.1 million b/d by 2021. The new contract runs to 2035.

The field produces around 1.46 million b/d, contributing approximately 25 per cent of Iraq's entire GDP, Elyaseri said. The partners have invested $15bn to transform the 60-year old field lifting output from just over 1 million b/d.

Water injection will be critical to meeting the plateau target. Along with other international oil companies developing Iraq’s southern oil fields, BP has been relying on Iraq to develop a giant seawater treatment facility, which will be key to maintaining pressure in the southern oil fields and keeping the country’s longer-term oil production ambitions alive.

However, the oil ministry’s plans are years behind schedule, leaving the oil companies scrambling to implement their own projects. The cost of these individual developments would still have to be borne by Iraq, however, with any spending on the projects counted as a field development cost, and therefore reimbursed.

BP already operates the Garmat Ali water facility near Basra, producing around 1.25 million b/d of treated water for injection at Rumaila. The new pilot produced water injection scheme will help, but ultimately more water capacity will be needed.

"Demand of water resources for water injection in southern oil fields in these days is increasing with the increase in oil production and crises of surface water, and consequently... we should explore and exploit the non-conventional water resources,” said Abdulameer al-Ibraheemi, chief geologist at state-owned Basrah Oil Company.

“These will support our conventional one, especially as Iraq today suffers from a crisis of water release, and the oil fields conducted by foreign companies need to be achieved [for] high rates of oil production,” he added.

Al-Ibrahimi recommends that the oil ministry and oil companies should build a strategic alternative water project in each sector of each field.

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