Russia's Gazprom Neft develops tech to tap up to 9 bln tonnes of difficult oil

MOSCOW. June 6 (Interfax) - Gazprom Neft has developed a set of solutions under the Hard-to-Recover Reserves Development Technology federal project that will make it possible to develop up to 9 billion tonnes of difficult oil in Russia, the oil company reported.

"The results of the program were presented to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak at a meeting of the project committee in Khanty Mansiysk. Today more than 60% of oil reserves in Russia are hard-to-recover. Their extraction is complicated by the geological particulars, depth, density and tightness of formations. Developing such reserves requires advanced technologies and additional investments," the company said.

Together with research institutions and oilfield service organizations, as well as industrial partners from the nuclear sector, Gazprom Neft has developed and confirmed the effectiveness of a set of Russian tools that make it possible to slash the cost of extracting hard-to-recover reserves by two thirds, the company said.

More than ten solutions in the area of high-speed multistage hydraulic fracturing, reagents and digital instruments to support fracking, and horizontal drilling were developed and tested as part of the project. The new technologies are ready for replication and will help to develop the Achimov and Tyumen suites, as well as other difficult reserves at fields in Russia, the company said.

Gazprom Neft developed and tested Russian reagents to increase output that further boosted the oil recovery rate by 21 percentage points, a record for Russia's oil industry, the company said. It has registered patents for modern surfactant polymer flooding materials.

A research and manufacturing ecosystem has been built that, with government support, will be able to create a new industrial segment to introduce technologies to increase oil recovery rates using chemical methods, the company said. The full-scale rollout of these technologies will make it possible to tap additional reserves and give new life to dozens of mature fields in Western Siberia, Gazprom Neft said.