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Cairn India wants to tap local vendors such as Reliance Industries, Indian Oil Corporation, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, and Oil India to implement its chemical enhanced oil recovery project at Barmer, Rajasthan.
The project, which will help Cairn produce more oil from the Rajasthan fields, will require polymers worth over $300 million (₹1,800 crore today) every three years.
The actual potential of the Mangala field in Barmer is much higher and the key to achieve this is through enhanced oil recovery.
Mangala is producing 150,000 barrels of oil a day. Using the common technology for enhanced oil recovery, Cairn expects to produce 476 million barrels by 2040.
Cairn believes this estimated recovery is only 37 per cent of the stock tank oil initially in place.
The polymer project is expected to produce incremental 74 million barrels till 2040, which is a 6 per cent growth over the existing ultimate recovery projection, sources associated with the project said.
The total output from Rajasthan block is 190,881 barrels a day and Cairn has kept its projections for the current fiscal flat, as it will depend on the success of this project.
As part of the project, Cairn is planning to organise an awareness initiative this August for potential vendors to supply the polymer required.
The largest producer of such a polymer is Reliance Industries.
Enhanced oil recovery Most countries, including the US, Russia and Latin American nations, use some form of enhanced oil recovery.
Polymer-based enhanced oil recovery is extensively used in countries such as China, Canada and Oman.
Cairn hopes that first injection of polymer would be achieved by the fourth quarter of 2014.
Asked about huge scale of the project and the risk involved, another official said: “The scale of this Mangala enhanced oil recovery project implies unprecedented complexities in execution.”
How does the technology work? Enhanced oil recovery is a technology to improve the inflow performance of hydrocarbons from reservoir to well-bore.
Under this, special techniques are implemented to increase the amount of crude oil that can be extracted from a field, over and above conventional primary depletion which typically recovers 20-40 per cent of the stock tank oil initially in place.
Using this method, additional 10-20 per cent more can be extracted from a field, experts said.
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