To realise the potential in the oil and gas industry, there is a growing need to ensure that the right technology as well as motivated workforce, enthusiasm and good integration and stakeholders’ engagements must be put in place.
These contemporary technologies include carbon, oxygen advanced Varp design cement flurry, the micro fires cement, polymers and resins including the maracid with its improved properties that aid placement.
The Senior Production Technologist, Seplat Petroleum Development Company, Austine Okeigwe, who stated this during the monthly technical meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) in Lagos, also noted that the greatest asset in the exploration and production is the human capacity.
He said: "The greatest assets in the E&P are not the equipment or the reservoir but the people. Staying with the right set of people and with the development of the right tools, the benefits in the oil and gas industry would be fully realised.
Contemporary technologies he also said, were common place and available in the country adding we need expertise to deploy them in line with the government local content law.
Industry experts agreed that there was the need emphasise on expertise that would harness the potential in the oil and gas industry through proactive community engagement with the joint venture partnership.
He said many rewards were derived from brown fields when the right technologies as well as better workflow were applied, highlighting the fact that Nigeria still has a lot of potential in brown fields’ development.
Brown field, he explained, is a field that is nearing the end of its production life but incidentally is the same field that contributes about 70 per cent of global production even though we have fields’ still undergoing development and new fields with non-conventional technology.
These fields, he said, held the greatest potential for recovery of unproduced hydrocarbon because their recovery so far with existing technology had been between 30 and 40 per cent adding that there is a still effort to get what was left in them.
He said: "The brown field’s development is still the key to unlock our global hydrocarbon supply. The company has four producing fields and all the fields he said were brown because they have produced for between 20 and 30 years".
According to him, the most contribution is coming from Avo field, which he said was relatively the youngest of the fields producing about 11,000 barrels per day.
On the application of these modern technologies in the oil and gas industry, Okeigwe said that for a typical oil well, as you produce oil, water also climbs. He said with time production tends to dwindle because there could be competition between water and oil.
He said that technologies had significant roles in producing oil wells. He said that a well that was producing water could still have the scope to produce oil. The process he explained was to shut in the water and move to where there is oil. This he said could only be done with either the polymer or with the cement.
"If you have a reservoir that has been producing for a long time and the pressure can no longer support your production what you normally do is to introduce gas from surface to lighten the colour so that you can produce fields. We do that by gas lifting. So, those commonplace technologies forever have presence in any producing well whether oil or gas."
"If you have oil and water, there is no great problem except that your flow line sometimes because of the way you lay them is not flat."