Suncor, Boroko (2026)

03/11/2020

Role of petrophysicist

Petrophysics emphasizes those properties relating to the pore system and its fluid distribution and flow characteristics. These properties and their relationships are used to identify and evaluate:

· Hydrocarbon reservoirs

· Hydrocarbon sources

· Seals

· Aquifers

The petrophysicist or petrophysical engineer practices the science of petrophysics as a member of the reservoir management team. The petrophysicist provides answers on products needed and used by team members, as well as physical and chemical insights needed by other teammates.

The reservoir and fluid characteristics to be determined are:

· Thickness (bed boundaries)

· Lithology (rock type)

· Porosity

· Fluid saturations and pressures

· Fluid identification and characterization

· Permeability (absolute)

· Fractional flow (oil, gas, water)

It is easy to define these characteristics and to appreciate their part in the assessment of reserves. The difficult part comes in determining their actual value at a level of certainty needed to make economic decisions leading to development and production. The seven characteristics listed are interdependent (i.e., to properly determine porosity from a wireline log, one must know the lithology, fluid saturations, and fluid types). The science of petrophysics is then used to unscramble the hidden world of rock and fluid properties in reservoirs from just below the Earth’s surface to ones more than four miles deep. The petrophysicist then takes on many characteristics of the fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes to extrapolate, from the most meager of clues, the true picture of the subsurface reservoir using dogged determination to wrest all possible information from the available data, all the while enjoying the thrill of the hunt.

How does the petrophysicist solve this difficult problem? Archie’s general method is to subdivide the problem into smaller segments and iterate using all data until all data agree. One starting point is to determine rock types (petrofacies) wherein we identify:

· Pore type

· Pore size distribution

· Pore throat type

· Pore throat distribution

When coupled with fluid type, one can establish a capillary pressure model that will lead to understanding in-situ fluid saturations and fluid flow. However, the tools available to the petrophysicist are:

· Mud logging (solids, liquids, gasses, volumes, rates, concentrations, and temperature)

· Measurement while drilling (MWD) and Logging while drilling (LWD)

· Wireline logging (open- and cased-hole)

· Core sampling [(wireline (percussion and drilled) and whole] and core analysis

· Fluid sampling (wireline and/or drillstem tests)

This list is arranged in order of the usual acquisition sequence. The economics of a given evaluation may restrict the application of any of these tools.

22/10/2020

Oil and Gas Landowners Should Know how their Royalties are Calculated.
By Rickson Apa
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Firstly, HOW DID THE GOVERNMENT CALCULATED THE ROYALTIES FOR PNGLNG LOs TO BE ONLY 2%??
OBVIOUSLY, THIS 2% FIGURE WAS BASED ON ASSUMPTIONS. NO FORMAL FORMULA OR CALCULATIONS USED!!

What is Royalties?
It is obviously the Landowners share from the Gross Production. This is as per API Standards, GROSS Production or Well Head Value, and NOT NET Production. We can't Control Operations Expenses to receive a Net.

MOVING FORWARD
Oil and gas royalties are some of the most important parts of the leases between production companies and landowners. Royalties refer to landowners’ shares of the gross production of oil and gas, typically free from production costs. Oil and gas royalties are the reason most landowners agree to allow oil and gas drilling and production on a property.

Understanding how companies calculate oil and gas royalties can make it so a company doesn’t take advantage of you as a landowner, and help you understand how to come up with a fair royalty clause as an oil or gas company.

What Is an Oil and Gas Royalty?

Whenever a company begins oil and gas production, the law entitles the owner of the land to a portion of the total production. A royalty is the portion of production the landowner receives. A royalty clause in theoil or gas title process will typically give a percentage of the lease that the company pays to the owner of the mineral rights, minus production costs. Royalties are free from costs and charges, other than taxes.

Oil and gas companies base the price of oil and gas royalties on a percentage of the gross production from the land. It is a landowner’s responsibility to try to negotiate as high a royalty as possible when agreeing to enter a contract with an oil or gas company. There might be the opportunity for the property owner to take his or her royalties in the form of oil instead of in cash. However, unless the lessor knows a lot about the oil market, this might not be the wisest choice.

Most property owners will instead elect to take the royalties as cash at the current market price of the oil. Gas royalties generally come as cash, because market gas prices are difficult to value. It is possible for a property owner to stipulate separate payments for oil and gas royalties. Landowners can also negotiate royalty interest charges, due dates and late payment penalties. The lessor is the party in control of royalty terms and conditions in most cases.

Five Numbers You Need to Calculate Oil and Gas Royalties

Most landowners don’t exactly know how to accurately calculate royalty payments, especially in situations such as sharing oil and gas acreage with a neighboring property. While there are online calculators available to help with royalty calculation, it’s best to at least understand the basics of the calculation to ensure fairness. There are five units a landowner will need to know to perform the basic oil and gas royalty formula:

-Number of acres the landowner owns within the production unit

-Total size (in acres) of oil and gas production unit

-Total amount of production

-Production costs and taxes the company will take

-Royalty percentage the lease indicates

The oil and gas company initiating the lease should be able to provide the numbers for items one through four. To calculate the royalty percentage, a landowner will need to review the terms of the lease. The lease’s terms, check stubs for royalty payments, and the Department of Natural Resources public records should have the information you need to make your calculation.

Basic Oil and Gas Royalty Equation

There are several ways to calculate oil and gas royalty payments. There is a basic equation, as well as other considerations in more difficult contracts and items. The basic equation for calculating oil and gas royalties uses the above-mentioned five items. Landowners can use the basic equation to come up with the gross royalty amount:

Here’s an example of the equation in action:

You own 50 acres. The total size of the production unit is 1,000 acres. You signed a lease with the company in which you are to receive 20% of the gross oil and gas production within one year. The total amount of production was 40 barrels of oil, which sold for $100 per barrel, and 1,000,000 MCF of gas, which sold at $5 per MCF. The estimated total gross production was $5,004,000 in 90 days. To calculate your oil and gas royalties, you would first divide 50 by 1,000, and then multiply this number by .20, then by $5,004,000 for a gross royalty of $50,040.

Once you calculate your gross royalty amount, compare it to the number you see on your royalty check stubs. If the amount you’re getting is less, the oil and gas company could be reducing your royalties for some post-production cost and/or taxes. The amount the company reduces your gross royalty depends on what you agreed upon in your lease. Therefore, it’s important for a landowner to carefully review the leasing terms before signing his or her name on the dotted line.

Special Considerations When Calculating Oil and Gas Royalties

In most royalty clauses, the oil and gas production company will take care of the costs of exploration, production, and marketing (unless the clause states otherwise). If a clause states that the royalty is established “at the well,” this means the company won’t reduce the landowner’s royalty payment by production costs. If a royalty clause states that the royalty percentage must come from the highest price for fields within a certain radius, this is the prevailing price of the oil or gas. If the clause uses the market price at the well in the field as the prevailing price, this will be the amount the landowner uses to calculate royalties.

Some calculation methods connect oil and gas royalties to actual revenue the company receives from the sale of the oil or gas. Gas royalties most commonly use this method. A third royalty calculation type exists in which the landowner chooses to take the royalty “in kind,” or in the form of oil or gas instead of cash. This choice may give the landowner higher royalties based on the market, but again, the landowner would need to understand oil and gas sales. Landowners must also subtract the costs of royalty taxes, as well as the costs of moving the oil or gas from the well to storage tanks.

The most important thing to note when calculating oil and gas royalties is that each leasing agreement is unique. The landowner must carefully read the terms of the royalty clause before signing over the right to oil and gas production and try to negotiate better terms with the oil and gas company as desired. For assistance calculating your oil and lease royalty payment, talk to an attorney or contract negotiator. You will need several documents and important pieces of information before you can accurately gauge how much a gas and oil company should pay you in royalties.

Tools to Help You Calculate Oil and Gas Royalties

Oil and gas companies will use land surveys to calculate how much land you own, where your property boundaries exist, and your percentage of royalties based on land ownership. Performing an online public records search about your land can give you this information, and help you more accurately calculate a fair royalty agreement. Land records can also tell an oil and gas company if a property lease already exists, how long the lease lasts, and previous royalty amounts for the piece of land.

Landowners need to stay informed about their rights as mineral owners. Landmen must stay up to date on the most current information about oil and gas leasing agreements. Both parties can use online public records to gather more information about a property, calculate oil and gas royalties, and come up with fair royalty clauses in leasing agreements.

20/10/2020

Crude oil desalting
Removing salts and solids from crude oil is critical to refinery production efficiency. This put high demands on the heat exchangers. Proper cooling of effluent water is also required for further treatment in waste water plants. No matter the fouling tendency or corrosiveness of your desalter effluent, Alfa Laval heat exchangers secure maximum heat transfer efficiency and heat exchanger uptime.

Improving crude oil desalting processes

Reducing the salt content of the treated crude oil to acceptable levels creates high fouling throughout the process. To minimize downtime and optimize effluent cooling, low-fouling Alfa Laval heat exchangers are an excellent choice.
Increasing energy efficiency in refinery desalting processes
Recovering energy from desalting effluent water serves two purposes. Firstly, energy recovered is used to preheat feed water to the desalter in order to increase process efficiency. Secondly, it effectively cools the effluent water prior to treatment downstream at the waste water plant. Fully counter-current Alfa Laval heat exchangers that provide a close temperature approach of 5°C make it possible to maximize heat recovery.

Fouling mitigation in the desalting process

Fouling in desalter exchangers has a negative impact on energy recovery and, if the effluent is not properly cooled, it will enter the waste water treatment plant at a temperature that is too high for waste water processes and therefore may cause upsets.
There are different types of fouling, including salt deposition over time, sludge plugging during mud washing, or an oil film that covers the heat transfer surfaces thereby reduce heat transfer efficiency.
Depending on the nature and the severity of the fouling, it is crucial to properly design and install the right type of heat exchanger in order to maximize the run-length in-between maintenance.
Alfa Laval’s vast expertise and broad range of low-fouling heat exchangers provide you with the best solution to mitigate fouling problems at your plant.

Corrosion resistance

Desalter effluent water contains a high content of chloride salts. To minimize or eliminate corrosion problems, it is important to select the the right material for desalter heat exchangers based on the salt concentration, pH value and temperature.
Selecting a high-grade corrosion-resistant metal for traditional shell-and-tube heat exchangers is very expensive. But selecting the same metal for use in highly efficient Alfa Laval heat exchangers is much less expensive because the heat transfer surface is at least three times less than comparable shell-and-tubes and plates are made of thin metal sheets. This makes it both easy and economical to choose non-corrosive materials that extend the lifetime of critical process equipment.

CAPEX savings

To achieve high heat recovery, minimal fouling and less corrosion, it is necessary to use several large shell-and-tubes made of high-grade material in series. To ensure maximum uptime, the installation of stand-by equipment is recommended. However, this is a very costly solution – both in terms of the initial equipment investment cost and the installation costs.
Alfa Laval high-efficiency heat exchangers feature compact, space-saving designs with low fouling tendencies and are made of high-grade, corrosion-resistant material. This reduces both the size and number of heat exchangers required, thereby cutting the total installed cost of the equipment.

Proven crude oil desalting heat exchangers

Alfa Laval has about 100 heat exchangers installed in refinery desalting processes around the world. These maximize feed water preheating while effectively cooling effluent water. While doing so, our heat exchangers deliver continuous uptime and extend equipment lifetime to the crude oil refiners.

14/10/2020

The Role of Petroleum Production Engineering

Petroleum production involves two distinct but intimately connected general systems: the reservoir, which is a porous medium with unique storage and flow characteristics; and the artificial structures, which include the well, bottomhole, and wellhead assemblies, as well as the surface gathering, separation, and storage facilities. Production engineering is that part of petroleum engineering that attempts to maximize production (or injection) in a cost-effective manner.

In the 15 years that separated the first and second editions of this textbook worldwide production enhancement, headed by hydraulic fracturing, has increased tenfold in constant dollars, becoming the second largest budget item of the industry, right behind drilling. Complex well architecture, far more elaborate than vertical or single horizontal wells, has also evolved considerably since the first edition and has emerged as a critical tool in reservoir exploitation. In practice one or more wells may be involved, but in distinguishing production engineering from, for example, reservoir engineering, the focus is often on specific wells and with a short-time intention, emphasizing production or injection optimization.

In contrast, reservoir engineering takes a much longer view and is concerned primarily with recovery. As such, there may be occasional conflict in the industry, especially when international petroleum companies, whose focus is accelerating and maximizing production, have to work with national oil companies, whose main concerns are to manage reserves and long-term exploitation strategies. Production engineering technologies and methods of application are related directly and interdependently with other major areas of petroleum engineering, such as formation evaluation, drilling, and reservoir engineering. Some of the most important connections are summarized below.

Modern formation evaluation provides a composite reservoir description through threedimensional (3-D) seismic, interwell log correlation and well testing. Such description leads to the identification of geological flow units, each with specific characteristics. Connected flow units form a reservoir.

Drilling creates the all-important well, and with the advent of directional drilling technology it is possible to envision many controllable well configurations, including very long horizontal sections and multilateral, multilevel, and multibranched wells, targeting individual flow units. The drilling of these wells is never left to chance but, instead, is guided by very sophisticated measurements while drilling (MWD) and logging while drilling (LWD).

Control of drilling-induced, nearwellbore damage is critical, especially in long horizontal wells. Reservoir engineering in its widest sense overlaps production engineering to a degree. The distinction is frequently blurred both in the context of study (single well versus multiple well) and in the time duration of interest (long term versus short term). Single-well performance, undeniably the object of production engineering, may serve as a boundary condition in a fieldwide, long-term reservoir engineering study.

Conversely, findings from the material balance calculations or reservoir simulation further define and refine the forecasts of well performance and allow for more appropriate production engineering decisions. In developing a petroleum production engineering thinking process, it is first necessary to understand important parameters that control the performance and the character of the system. Below, several definitions are presented.

07/10/2020

Air drilling
Air drilling—also known as pneumatic percussion drilling[1] —is an underbalanced drilling (UBD) technique in which gases, usually compressed air or nitrogen, are used to cool the drill bit and lift the cuttings of a wellbore in place of conventionally used liquids. Known for being more efficient and inexpensive than conventional drilling, air drilling still has drawbacks and skeptics, despite its 60-year history of use in the industry.
History
The first recorded use of air drilling was in the early 1860s. A piston-type compressed air mechanical drill bit bored an 8.5-mile-long Mont Cenis Tunnel in the Alps. Air drilling became a popular alternative to rotary drilling in the late 1940s and early 1950s.[2] Because of limited air compression equipment to properly clean the annulus as the well was drilled, air-drilled holes were normally limited to shallow wells (

03/10/2020

Gas Plants

Gas processing consists of separating the various hydrocarbons and fluids from the pure natural gas to produce what is known as “pipeline quality” dry natural gas. Major transportation pipelines usually impose restrictions on the makeup of natural gas that is allowed into the pipeline. Before the natural gas can be transported it must be purified.

Whatever the source of the 17-natural gas, once separated from crude oil (if present) it commonly exists in mixtures with other hydrocarbons, principally ethane, propane, butane and pentanes. In addition, raw natural gas contains water v***r, hydrogen sulfide (H2S), carbon dioxide, helium, nitrogen and other compounds. Associated hydrocarbons, known as “natural gas liquids” (NGL), are used as raw materials for oil refineries or petrochemical plants and as sources of energy.

Gas compression

Gas from a pure natural gas wellhead might have sufficient pressure to feed directly into a pipeline transport system. Gas from separators has generally lost so much pressure that it must be recompressed to be transported. Turbine driven compressors gain their energy by using a small proportion of the natural gas that they compress. The turbine itself serves to operate a centrifugal compressor, which contains a type of fan that compresses and pumps the natural gas through the pipeline. Some compressor stations are operated by using an electric motor to turn the centrifugal compressor. This type of compression does not require the use of any natural gas from the pipe; however, it does require a reliable source of electricity nearby. The compression includes a large section of associated equipment such as scrubbers (to remove liquid droplets) and heat exchangers, l**e oil treatment, etc.

24/09/2020

Fractional distillation of crude oil

Fractional distillation separates a mixture into a number of different parts, called fractions.

A tall fractionating column is fitted above the mixture, with several condensers coming off at different heights. The column is hot at the bottom and cool at the top. Substances with high boiling points condense at the bottom and substances with lower boiling points condense on the way to the top.

Crude oil is a mixture of hydrocarbons. The crude oil is ev***rated and its vapours condense at different temperatures in the fractionating column. Each fraction contains hydrocarbon molecules with a similar number of carbon atoms and a similar range of boiling points.

Oil fractions

The diagram below summarises the main fractions from crude oil and their uses, and the trends in properties. Note that the gases leave at the top of the column, the liquids condense in the middle and the solids stay at the bottom.

The fractionating column

As you go up the fractionating column, the hydrocarbons have:

1. lower boiling points

2. lower viscosity (they flow more easily)

3. higher flammability (they ignite more easily).

Other fossil fuels

Crude oil is not the only fossil fuel.

Natural gas mainly consists of methane. It is used in domestic boilers, cookers and Bunsen burners, as well as in some power stations.

Coal was formed from the remains of ancient forests. It can be burned in power stations. Coal is mainly carbon but it may also contain sulfur compounds, which produce sulfur dioxide when the coal is burned. This gas is a cause of acid rain. Also, as all fossil fuels contain carbon, the burning of any fossil fuel will contribute to global warming due to the production of carbon dioxide.

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