BP to extract more oil out west
THE CLAIR Ridge oil field west of Shetland will become BP’s first large scale development to use a new method to extract more hydrocarbons from existing reservoirs.
The oil company announced on Thursday that around 42 million barrels of additional oil should be produced from Clair using the newly developed enhanced oil recovery (EOR) system using reduced salinity water injection.
The £4.5 billion Clair Ridge project, the second phase of development of the massive reservoir 75 kilometres north west of Shetland, is due to come on stream in 2016.
Over its 40 year lifetime the field is expected to produce 640 million barrels of oil.
EOR technologies help to recover significantly more oil than conventional technologies such as waterflooding.
BP said implementation of its new LoSal® EOR technology will help increase the world’s recoverable oil by billions of barrels.
BP’s partners in the Clair Ridge development are ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Shell.
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