Are you concerned about the marine environment in the North Sea? Do you consider yourself as a friend to the environment and the creatures living in marine areas?
In our research, we aim to defeat the challenges in the way of eliminating potential unfavorable impact of oil production to the marine environment. But how? Please bear in mind the keyword “PWRI” which symbolizes produced water re-injection.Let’s know more details about our investigation.
Oil production basically means the extraction of an oil, gas, and water mixture from the underground layers. The water that is produced together with oil and gas is called produced water or water cut. In some cases, like what is observed in the North Sea, up to 80-90 percent of the production mixture belongs to the produced water. Handling this huge amount of water would be challenging especially on offshore platforms where space is limited. The gas that is produced with oil and water is H2S, known as a highly toxic gas and the enemy of the environment and human beings. A combination of the chemicals utilized to remove this gas from the mixture stream and some other chemicals added to fa-cilitate oil production partitions to the produced water phase. This produced water is discharged to the sea that may have negative impacts on the surroundings and creatures and thus not favorable. There-fore, PWRI is proposed as an alternative to surface discharge in which the produced water is injected to the existing water injection wells, or in dedicated disposal reservoirs under the ground. In this way, discharge of potentially harmful chemicals to the marine environment is removed. The problem ob-served during the reinjection process of produced water is the potential reduction of injection called injectivity loss due to the precipitation of solid/chemical/organic complexes on the interface of porous media (the container in which produced water is stored) and thus clogging the entrance point of the water.
Frequent acid injections have shown an appropriate potential for removing the precipitated components. In this study, we aspire to develop a method for continuous injection of ultra-low concentration acid/salt injected simultaneously with produced water to resolve the injectivity loss experienced during PWRI process. We make a contrast between different chemical solutions, using ultra-low concentra-tion – as an additive for preventing solid/chemical/organic complexes precipitation/accumulation for PWRI schemes in the chalk oil fields of North Sea.
We plan to figure out the performance of ultra-low concentration acid treatment through analysis across different scales from lab-scale to well-scale. The primary queries to be addressed are:
• How efficient and fast are these methods at the lab-scale? 2
• What are the minimum concentrations (for continuous injection) and optimum conditions for these methods to work?
• What are the operational challenges and risks for applying these solutions in the wells and how they could be prevented?
By conducting this research, we hope to affect the environmental issues related to offshore oil and gas operations considerably and take significant paces toward sustainability by introducing an environ-mentally friendly method to manage the produced water.