DOE to invest in offshore enhanced oil recovery R&D projects

The US Department of Energy will invest nearly $9 million in three offshore enhanced oil recovery research and development projects, DOE’s Fossil Energy Office reported.

FEO said the projects aim to enhance the potential for EOR in offshore settings by advancing promising proof-of-concept technologies to reduce subsea facility complexity, increase control and monitoring, and enable greater tieback distances to production facilities. These projects will focus on maximizing the value of conventional resources in offshore settings, FEO said.

The projects will be executed in two phases, it said. Phase 1 will involve proof-of-concept validation of tools, technologies, and processes in a laboratory or field analog setting. Phase 2 will consist of an integrated full-scale prototype demonstration in a relevant environment to persuade stakeholders to continue developing the technology to the commercialization phase.

DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory will manage the three projects, which involve:

• Improving EOR’s efficiency and capability in offshore wells through a $5.25-million Project ULTRA which uses underwater laser telecommunications and remote access technology. Oceanlit Laboratories Inc. of Honolulu plans to advance the ULTRA technology by scaling up marine modular units to demonstrate a high-bandwidth, scalable subsea communications system that enables near real-time data exfiltration for 4D seismic reservoir monitoring, said DOE, which is contributing $3 million.

• Enhancing offshore EOR by enabling longer, safer, and cheaper subsea well tiebacks in Houston-based Subsea Shuttle LLC’s $5-million project to which DOE is contributing nearly $2.9 million. The two-phase project will construct and qualify a full-scale prototype subsea chemical storage and injection system for production chemicals enabling longer tie-backs (reaching resources that otherwise would not be recovered), DOE said.

• Developing an advanced multidimensional capacitance sensors-based subsea multiphase mass flow meter to measure and monitor offshore EOR systems. Tech4Imaging LLC of Columbus, Ohio, plans to provide a means for EOR developers to measure and monitor multiphase flows in-situ for offshore installations, said DOE, which is contributing nearly $3 million to the $5.3-million project.

Contact Nick Snow at [email protected].