Overview: Production/Facilities (December 2007)

Abstract

It does not seem a year since the last facilities feature. The theme this year is about heavy-oil upgrading to light oil; although a paper about wax seems to have slipped in too. Heavy oil is an enormous energy resource that still is largely untapped. The challenge is to get the stuff out of the ground as fast as the lighter oil that we currently produce. Unfortunately, the density and viscosity usually make this target very difficult in the end. However, heavy oil is not all bad; on a volume basis, it contains more energy than lighter oil. Currently, the industry is attempting to justify heavy-oil developments on two fronts: by developing new means for extracting it faster and by increasing its value. This is where the real prize is in heavy oil—its value. Its value currently is largely unrecognized; it sells often much cheaper than lighter oil even though it contains more energy on a volume basis. The industry is currently developing ways to upgrade it to light oil to add value; but there are other ways of adding value, and to find these, one must re-examine the business model of the upstream industry that has not changed in 150 years. We continue to produce and sell crude oil to refiners and let the oil traders set the price. We can, and should, be more proactive in finding ways to exploit the irreplaceable value of oil. Production/Facilities additional reading available at the SPE eLibrary: www.spe.org SPE 107958 "Modeling Rapid Multiphase Flow in Wells and Pipelines Under Nonequilibrium and Nonisothermal Conditions" by Guillermo Michel, University of Oklahoma, et al. SPE 108752 "A Study of Normal Slug Flow in an Offshore Production Facility With a Large-Diameter Flowline" by E. Guzmán Vázquez, National Autonomous University of Mexico, et al. SPE 104133 "Leak Detection for Gas and Liquid Pipelines by Transient Modeling" by Shouxi Wang, Gas Liquids Engineering, et al.