18 February 2005
Iraq’s oil ministry has launched its first reservoir study center, as it gears up to work with international companies BP, Exploration Consultants Ltd. (ECL) and Royal Dutch/Shell on landmark reviews of its key Rumaila and Kirkuk oil fields, according to an Iraqi oil official.
The center, established by the ministry’s reservoirs and field development department, is the first in Iraq, and has already been equipped with workstations and computers donated by an oil company. The ministry is now waiting for the delivery of software to enable its staff to conduct reservoir studies on their own, the official said.
“By midyear our staff will be able to combine their knowledge of field reservoir performance with the latest technology and conduct reservoir studies on their own,” the official told International Oil Daily from Baghdad.
The new center in Baghdad, which should be followed by two more in northern and southern Iraq, represents a big leap for the oil ministry into the world of petroleum technology, to which it has been denied access for decades. The aim is to create a geophysical and geological database for Iraq’s numerous oil fields, especially the dozen or so producing fields.
Some of the engineers in the reservoirs department will gain some expertise from exposure to international standards, as ECL — which is conducting the first phase of the study for the Rumaila oil fields as well as all of the Kirkuk study — prepares to move staff to Iraq over the next two weeks.
According to contracts signed last month, the effective date for the launch of the studies is Feb. 15. However, Iraqi officials say much of the preparatory work, which includes data gathering, got under way in recent weeks.
The first three months of ECL’s work will see production data collected by the oil ministry scrutinized, cleaned and fed into a database.
This stage also involves creating a history for reservoir performance since the start of production. In Kirkuk’s case, this goes back to the late 1920s when the first barrels of oil were produced by the Turkish Petroleum Co., following discovery of the field in 1927.
At the time, the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. — which later evolved into the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., and then BP — had a 47.5% share in TPC, while Royal Dutch/Shell and Total ancestor CFP held 22.5% and 25%, respectively. The remaining 5% was held by Armenian entrepreneur Calouste Gulbenkian.
TPC was renamed Iraq Petroleum Co. in 1929 after a group of US oil companies — including the predecessors of Exxon and Mobil — joined and shares were redistributed.
South Rumaila was discovered in 1953 by the same company, while North Rumaila was brought on stream in the 1970s by Iraq after nationalization.
Much of the early data on Kirkuk and South Rumaila is already available in the archives of BP and Shell, as shareholders in the original concession operator. Iraq’s reservoir department will contribute production data and well logs for the years since nationalization of Kirkuk in 1972 and South Rumaila in 1975.
The two studies, the first in two decades for Rumaila and three decades for Kirkuk, aim to give the Iraqi oil ministry its first comprehensive studies of its largest producing fields, with a view to introducing the latest technologies to monitor the reservoirs and their performance.
In a second stage, to be conducted outside of Iraq by joint BP-Iraqi and ECL-Iraqi teams, a geological model for each reservoir will be built, and data exported to those models. These will then be improved with geo-statistical analysis. Later, simulation models will be built, and used to establish a historical match with previous performance of the reservoirs, in order to predict the future performance of reservoirs under different scenarios of production.
Shell will provide a support role to the oil ministry on the Kirkuk study, and will finance that field’s reservoir work.
By Ruba Husari, London
(Published in International Oil Daily Feb. 18, 2005)