Rosneft, within the framework of its portfolio of innovative projects, is developing technologies for the most relevant areas of development. Over the entire period, the company received more than 800 new technologies that are successfully used in production activities. This was announced at a press conference of the company.
One of these areas is the development of technologies for involving hard-to-recover reserves (TRIZ) into development. “What was hard to recover three years ago is already becoming a natural object of our work,” Alexander Pashali, director of the department for scientific and technological development and innovations of Rosneft, told a press conference today. According to him, over 1,500 horizontal wells have already been drilled on the basis of proprietary technologies, which ensured the involvement in development of more than 100 million tons, which was previously called hard-to-recover oil.
So Alexander Pashali cited the so-called Bazhenov suite as an example. This is a giant Siberian shale oil field. According to various sources, the formation contains up to 2 trillion barrels of oil. Of these, potentially recoverable, according to some estimates, are considered to be about 180-360 billion barrels, according to others, 74 billion barrels. At the end of 2020, 9 horizontal wells with multi-stage hydraulic fracturing were commissioned there with an average start-up flow rate of more than 50 tons per day, which corresponds to the best world practices and exceeds the previous experience by 1.5-3 times.
Also last year, Rosneft, together with the Innopraktika company and the Lomonosov Moscow State University, created a prototype of the RN-Digital Kern corporate software complex. The project will result in its own digital core laboratory, where, thanks to “digitization”, the problem of long-term storage and protection from destruction of real rock images will be solved.
The digital approach will make it possible to more efficiently select enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods for fields due to “digital” testing of a large number of EOR options on the same “digital” samples under identical conditions. Carrying out such a number of experiments with real core is impossible due to the limited bank of samples for research, as well as because of the enormous financial and time costs. According to Alexander Pashali, the introduction of the Company’s own developments will multiply the volume of geological information that will help find optimal design solutions for the assets of Rosneft.