Salym Petroleum Places Stake on Tertiary EOR

KHMAO Governor Natalya Komarova and SPD CEO Oleg Karpushin | Photo courtesy of Salym Petroleum.

By Elena Zhuk, June 18, 2014

Salym Petroleum Development N.V. (Salym Petroleum), Gazprom Neft’s and Shell’s joint venture (50/50), continues optimizing a chemical flooding technology based on a three-component mixture of anionic SAA, sodium, and polymer (ASP). The technology is used to enhance recovery and, to start with, it will be employed on the company’s four fields that have already entered the production maintenance stage.

According to Yakov Volokitin, the head of Geology, Field Development and New Technologies Department at SPD, the company currently works on a pilot project and in 2014 plans to drill seven wells where ASP will be used.

Now the project’s infrastructure is being constructed and a unique unit is being built to inject the three-component “mix” into formation.

Today chemical agents – one of the main components of the technology – are being imported, but to make the project more cost-effective, they also consider a possibility to manufacture the said agents in Russia. According to Yakov Volokitin, negotiations with several local producers are under way. Once the technology is moved to the commercial scale production, the demand for these agents will approximate 10,000 tons per year.

Under the pilot project, they are to start injecting the agents in 2015 and it will be possible to speak of practical effect by the end of that year. The cost of the pilot project which the company intends to complete by 2016, amounts to $70 million. The technology’s commercialization is scheduled for 2018.

Having chosen tertiary EOR, the company counts on tax privileges. According to Yakov Volokitin, they have sent a proposal with two tax optimization options to a number of relevant government agencies. The first option suggests MET deduction provided for tertiary EOR; the second option relates to switching from MET to EPT.

According to SPD’s data, introduction of ASP technology makes it possible to produce the additional 25 million tons of oil within the period of eight to 10 years.

Copyright, Oil&Gas Eurasia, 2014