Inject your sour gas

Injecting sour gas into your reservoir can support pressure, but it might also open a can of regulatory worms.

After 50 years of production, one operator decided to add sour gas injection to his pool. It was a great idea, but his application took over a year to approve.

Injection saves the cost of transportation and processing sour gas. But check out the hoops required when you want to inject sour gas.

He had problem after problem in his application. And the service that submitted it didn't help a bit. You can have all his application documents delivered to you within moments by clicking on the button below.

See the entanglement with stake holders that occurred as a result of one objection. Check out the way the regulator handled the stake holder concerns.

His vapor-liquid-equilibrium diagram illustrates the complexity of phase behavior with sour gas inject. You can see more about his VLE curve in the application documents.

Reduce the cost of exploration

Injecting gas is a way to reduce the cost of tie-in of your exploration prospect. Because gas injection supports pressure, it also increases the potential reserves of your exploration find.

Reducing the cost and increasing the reserves of an exploration play decreases your finding costs. Who can hate that?

Where will the gas go?

For gravity stable gas floods, chase gas usually stays at the top of the structure. But for other types of floods, injected gas might end up in a place you least expect. The more you inject, the more you learn.

Even better than learning from your own mistakes, is learning from the mistakes of others. There are dozens of pools that are injecting gas in the province. Many have been injecting for 5-30 years. Looking at their floods will help you learn more about this the benefits and pitfalls of immiscible gas injection.

Save the cost of tie-in

If you don't need to tie in the solution gas, you can save capital. This applicant already had his gas tied-in, but there were other advantages for him to injection solution gas.

Will it make a difference in recovery?

Many operators believe their gas injection will make a great difference in their oil recovery. You can look at their application documents to see their projected recovery factors.

You can also see the injection patterns they're using. Almost every application uses a different pattern.

The nice thing about looking for technical information about gas injection from applications is that you can see the actual UWI of the injectors. You can go to Accumap and see the injection response. We call it ground truthing technical advances.

Better than technical papers

This is much better than seeing technical information in SPE papers. SPE authors only emphasize one aspect of a technical topic. They usually try to conceal much of the other critical oil and gas information.

Not so with an application. The regulator requires all the detail. They adjudicate the application with a careful eye to understand the technical merits of the entire operation. You can learn much more from applications than SPE papers.

Easily search for gas injection schemes

Using AppIntel's google-like search function you can find all the gas injection applications. Just type into the KiP box  immiscible gas injection  or  solution gas injection.

Granger Low  17 Jan 2017

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