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Digital Essentials in Production Strategy

Rossy Pérez - Beicip-Franlab
General Manager

STORY INLINE POST

Sun, 03/08/2020 - 09:20

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Q: Given your extensive experience with PEMEX assets, how are you collaborating with the NOC to achieve the government’s desired production goals?

A: PEMEX continues to be our main client in Mexico. We continue to negotiate directly with the company and we are also providing it with our services as part of our active technology contract. This contract contemplates services to provide advanced consulting technical expertise in the areas of exploration and planning activities, such as subsurface studies, plus the implementation of new technologies in the service of new strategies to develop their fields. Although we are interested in applying some of the latest lessons learned internationally on PEMEX’s unconventional fields and field development, we are also focusing on using our experience with enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and secondary recovery techniques in the areas where that could apply to help the NOC increase production at its flagship conventional and mature fields. Beicip-Franlab, as a member of the EOR Alliance with IFPEN and Solvay, aims to cover the full range of services from pre-feasibility to pilot design and implementation.

We believe PEMEX is in a great position to reverse its current production decrease and we are open to helping the company achieve that. Furthermore, our work within the Mexican oil and gas industry will continue to focus on PEMEX, as well as other Mexican government dependencies with which we are negotiating collaboration agreements, such as IMP, SENER and CONACYT. Our negotiations with new operators entering the Mexican market are still preliminary and hosted by our France office.

Q: Which technologies have the best chance of boosting PEMEX’s production?

A: One of the most important components of our OpenFlow integrated suite is the PumaFlow reservoir simulator. This tool helps us to simulate production for any reservoir configuration, including black-oil, dual medium, compositional, chemical EOR, thermal and unconventional reservoirs into a single calculator and user interface. For the last 20 years, PumaFlow has been the reference simulator for fractured reservoirs and the modeling of all exchange mechanisms between matrix and fractures, including capillarity, gravity drainage and viscous forces, diffusion and block-to-block re-imbibition. We can simulate the conditions of the reservoir in a way that helps us formulate a proposal for the application of these recovery techniques in a manner specifically designed to fit those conditions. Our exploration software also plays a vital role among our Mexican projects. This includes tools such as TemisFlow, DionisosFlow and CougarFlow. These programs help us integrate a solution for basin modeling. They can be expressed through Cougar Flow in terms of uncertainty analysis for the fields and reservoirs. We are also significantly aided in this process by DionisosFlow’s unique stratigraphic modeling capabilities. Combining these three tools helps our team visualize the possibilities and opportunities that exploration represents in each field.

Q: What are the most outstanding applications of these technologies in your projects with PEMEX?

A: We had two projects in Ku-Maloob-Zaap, within the Ku area, that considered areas of the reservoir in which PEMEX wants to propose new well locations in order to increase its production in the areas outside the current producing wells at the Jurassic level. Another project within that asset was focused on secondary recovery at the middle Eocene level.

We are planning to also look at fracture modeling possibilities within this and other reservoirs through another of our OpenFlow tools called FracaFlow. We will be applying these and other technologies, methodologies and strategies for field development both in Ku-Maloob-Zaap and also in the larger south region assets, particularly in new development areas opened up in the region. In exploration, we are only beginning negotiations because exploration activity at PEMEX has slowed in the last few years. 

 

Beicip-Franlab is a developer of upstream software and a provider of consultancy services for exploration and production. Its OpenFlow Suite is a package of modeling tools that supports the minimization of exploration risk and recovery optimization.

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