Read the interview with Igor Fedotov, Deputy General Director of LUKOIL-Volgograd

Oil of Russia magazine

Work being done within the LUKOIL Group has opened up great new prospects for development department specialists at the LUKOIL-VolgogradNIPImorneft Institute. This division of the Institute has won considerable recognition on the Russian and international markets, and is effectively solving problems associated with oil production on the Caspian Sea shelf.

Q: Can you tell us about your Institute's work on the Caspian Sea's offshore oil fields?

A: The Institute's oil and gas field development department is the division carrying out research work on analyzing the development of oil and gas fields, the hydrodynamic modelling of reservoirs, analyzing and validating methods for enhanced oil recovery, and monitoring the process of developing oil fields and new technologies for the production of oil and gas. Our experts have been doing research on the Caspian fields for quite some time. The first work was done in 1997. Since then, six fields have been opened within the Severny license area.

The Institute's specialists continue to analyze the geological structure of the area. The discovery of the Tsentralnoye oil field is a joint venture between LUKOIL and Gazprom. A total cycle of studies has been performed in the oil field. The hydrocarbon reserves there are quite substantial: more than 100 million tons of oil equivalent.

Q: What are some of the difficulties in developing oil fields on the Caspian Sea?

A: Every oil and gas field in the waters of the Caspian Sea is unique. We're always looking for effective technologies to develop them. The main feature of all offshore oil fields is that it's impossible to drill a large number of exploratory wells. This is why our experts continually use the results from seismic tests and reservoir forecasts.

Hydrocarbon production on the Caspian Sea is also complicated by the shallow formation depth. At the Yury Korchagin oil field, for example, the pay bed of producing horizontal wells is several kilometres long. It has to be divided into several segments whose production can be regulated independently.

Many of the Caspian Sea oil fields have a gas cap. This feature can negatively affect the operation of a well, but by taking a skilled approach and using the energy of the gas, we can even enhance oil recovery.

Our offshore field development experts have also to consider what is technologically possible in well construction and oil production. It's impossible to install the same equipment on offshore wells as on onshore wells. We have to know in advance how one unique set of equipment or another will operate. On the limited area of the platform, we have to use a strictly defined set of devices and machinery.

We can't forget other important tasks either. From the very beginning of production, we had to service the equipment on the platform, supply gas for operating the electrical generators, support the living of the workers, and treat the oil. As a rule, we had to return the water we brought up back into the producing reservoir, rather than discharging it into the sea. This required the drilling of additional gas-producing and water-absorbing wells. The drilling of these service wells slows down the rate at which new producing wells are put into operation.

Q: Is the idea of profitability the key factor in planning the development of the Caspian oil fields?

A: The cost of offshore production is considerably higher than that onshore, so our wells must have quite high yields in order for us to recover our expenditures. This is important. I have to say, though, that in the waters of the Caspian, along with pools of light crude, we've found fields containing substantial reserves, but the oil is going to be hard to get out. These are high-viscosity crudes, and the porous qualities of the formations aren't very good – their permeability is low. Right now, we're looking for effective production techniques to use in some of these fields.

Special work is being done to analyze the risks of using one set of developmental techniques or another. We're carefully and thoroughly analyzing the structure of the fields and their saturation with hydrocarbons.

Q: What are your immediate and long-term offshore plans?

A: Plans for the further work of the Institute's offshore developers involve those fields that have been discovered but for which we still haven't found effective methods of development. An intensive search for new techniques is going on all the time. We're sure that new fields will be found in other sectors of the Caspian as well. In brief, we still have a lot of work to do.

 

2. Make up the Participle II of the following regular verbs; classify them according to the type of pronunciation, translate the verbs into Russian:

[d]	[t]	[id]
carried out	enhanced	validated

 

to analyze, to complicate, to divide, to discharge, to recover, to open, to continue, to discover, to perform, to develop, to use, to produce, to regulate, to affect, to consider, to install, to operate, to define, to service, to supply, to treat, to rig, to require, to slow down, to involve.