State-of-the-Art of Injection Water Treatment for Offshore OG production

Water flooding technology has been selected as the key Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) for DHRTC research and development activities. Mærsk has already been using water flooding for some of the filed productions. However, some challenges/problems have been observed by Mærsk regarding to their injection water treatment processes, such as
a) Balance issue of working loads for different filtration stages, e.g., for coarse filter and fine filter systems;
b) The poor performance of pre-defined control sequence for filtration and back-flashing;
c) Fouling challenges, incl. fouling detection, modeling and prediction;
d) Oxygen as well as particle size monitoring;
e) Sea-water pumps efficiency issues, where the sea water is directly used for injection purpose after some treatment.
AAU-ET at Esbjerg campus has also been committing the research on industrial application of membrane filtration technology, initially with the aim for promoting the produced water treatment into the level of zero-discharge of hydrocarbons. Through there are a lot of similarities between PWT and IWT using membrane filtration technologies, there are still some different respects and concerns. Thereby, closely coorperated with Mærsk colleagues, this mini-project aims to investigate and document the state-of-the-art of IWT technology, especially those correlated with Mærsk’s current IWT operations. Some top 3-5 key concerned issues/challenges need to be identified by the end, and these identified issues/challenges should be further investigated in the near future.