No Updates Anymore

Just letting you know. I’ve done the paper. Entered the competition. Got 3rd Place. Airplane tickets, hotels, all paid for by the company =)

THanks for everyones support

Diary Entry 4: The Badly Needed Update

First of all, i would like to say my biggest thanks for those readers who keep checking out this post for updates, thank you for the support. I would also like to apologise for the lack of updates. Don’t worry, i have not abandoned this paper competition and i am still doing it.

I guess i owe you several updates of what i have been doing, and of course, theres good news, bad news and the “what-the-fuckOh.. thats quite alright, actually” news

The good news is that my paper has been accepted for this year’s SPE student paper competition. I’ll be presenting in Perth in October during the Asia Pacific Oil and Gas Conference. I be pitting my presentation against 10-15 other students, predominantly from Indonesia and China, with a few Japanese and Iranian students.

The bad news is that i lost most of my simulation data when i lost my pen drive. This is pure stupidity and carelessness in my part and i have only myself to blame. This means that i have to redo my stuff and do it quickly before July when my supervisor leaves for a conference. As a learning point of action, i’ve invested in a hard disk drive, where it would be impossible to lose it in someone’s ass.

The other news is that, when i was rebuilding my simulation codes, i found a massive error on my part, which explains the idealistic production of gas. It was because that the properties of natural gas weren’t thoroughly and extensively defined. At first, i didn’t think it wouldn’t make so much of a difference but when i’ve included extensive definitions of properties for natural gas, production data started to vary a lot, which ironically, is more natural. I partly blame this due to the fact that Winprop, the program to define properties was not working correctly with computers in the petroserver. It was either licence was not granted for the school or it was the school’s half assed attempt to install the program

In a way, rebuilding the simulation made my results more believable and certainly more exciting. This was indeed one of those cases where you could definitely say that the disaster was a blessing in diguise.

Diary Entry 3: Entering into an Unknown World

For the past 2-3 weeks, i’ve been intensifying the literature review on WAG processes. For the past week, i’ve narrowed down in finding literature on WAG in gas reservoirs. Here’s the catch, there is none (if there is, i can certainly count them with my fingers).

This, in a way, triggered some sense of excitement and as well as great fear in me. Excitement because i’m diving into a subject, which.. people haven’t considered doing practically. WAG in oil reservoirs is emerging as a strong option, WAG in gas reservoirs is simply unheard of.

I have great fear because reading these literatures is giving me the sense that, WAG is really not an easy subject at all. One blinding fear is the fact that literature (Christensen et. al. (1)) points out that WAG simulation in computers is far more optimistic than if done in done in the field. This is because of the complex relationship of capillary pressure and relative permeability when you have 3 fluids (gas, water and CO2) in the reservoir (Muggeridge, 2005 (2)). It’s not enough to take simple correlations and just chuck them into the simulator, the error is unacceptable.

It does dawn on me the complexity of task at hand. Scares the shit out of me because i’m still an undergraduate tackling on complex task. There’s a reasonable fear that i’d be too simplistic in my assumptions or correlations that i’d make a fool out of myself in the end.

Oh well, the risk you take. You gotta take risks..

1. Christensen, J.R., Stenby, E.H. and Skauge, A.: “Review of WAG Field Experience,” SPE Reserv. Eval. Eng. 4(2), 97-106, 2001.
2. Muggeridge, Anne: “Experimental and Numerical Investigations of Oil Recovery from Secondary WAG Injection” DTI Oil and Gas, Issue 10, June 2005.

Entry 2: Update

I haven’t been neglecting this site. It’s just that for the past.. 2 weeks or so, i have just been overwhelmed by the amount of information i needed to absorb.

In addition to the papers i needed to read, i was told to prepare an overview report for the subject. Sensing my superviosr is a bit frustrated with the lack of progress, this pressured me more. 3 Days before i was suppose to submit in the work, i got locked out of my apartment.. and it was the weekend, so i couldnt get the spare keys off the agents. My neighbours weren’t helful in letting me in so i had to bunk in my juniors house for 2 days. Man, those were the times i wished i threw myself off the balcony.

Come submission date, i compiled a report where i couldve done a lot better. He read a little bit and told me he’s quite pleased with the diagrams ive put out and the preliminary work. Man.. i’m so relieved.

Mental note to self: I’m not taking PhD. Nooo freakin way.

Diary Entry 1: Gas gas gas

It is recommended that you read every bit of knowledge in the tabs =)

Reading Material (attached and me maybe risking sharing violations):
“Tight Gas Sands” – Stephen Holditch
2006_holdith_tight-gas-sands_spe103356.pdf
SPE paper 103356

Back in 2nd year of university, i took a petroleum geology course. I remember the lecturer saying that natural gas is one of the most abundant sources of energy in the world. The tricky part is that it’s how these gas exists. The gas we come to usually we get to know about comes from gas reservoirs underground.

In this course, he brought up the term ‘gas hydrates’. What? what is that? In simple terms, gas hydrates are thingamagics that is composed primarily water and methane (some other stuff in it as well). Conditions that it is subjected to make the water (liquid) and methane (gas) exists as a hard substance, like a rock.

The good news is that, it is estimated that these things, alongside with other unconventional sources of gas (like tight gas) are estimated to be about 100-1000 times more in abundance than all of the gas reservoir reserves known today (i don’t know how drunkenly optimistic this estimated figure is). In short, that’s A LOT of gas for energy. The problem is that, it’s not something that you can easily take out. Firstly, a lot of of it is still underground. Secondly, most of it is still underneath oceans, where freezing temperatures make it ideal for hydrate formation.

So how do you extract rocks thats a few kilometres under sea level and just below the surface? We still haven’t figure it out yet.

This paper just made me realise that before we jump into the world of gas hydrates, we could extract energy from the tight gas reservoirs, which is quite a lot in nature. However, how we can extract them is still currently subject to strong research and experimentation. The figure below, from Holditch’s paper, illustrates this nicely,

So if you are an optimist, like me, then i say there’s massive potential for gas production. However, this is an estimate, it could be a mistake. This doesn’t mean we should lay off efforts to introduce renewable energies and efficient use of energy. Environment is the main concern here as well.