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Wintershall activities in the Middle East
EOR project “Schizophyllan”
Wintershall will be presenting itself at the world’s largest oil and gas congress – the World Petroleum Congress 2011 in Doha, Qatar, from 4 – 8 December 2011. Every three years representatives from government, oil and gas companies as well as other stakeholders meet to discuss the latest technological and scientific developments in oil and gas industry and how to balance economic and ecological requirements. The 20th World Petroleum Congress and the accompanying convention are being held in the Qatar National Convention Center (QNCC). Wintershall will be a Gold Sponsor of the event with its own stand (# 7101). The congress is being hosted by the Middle East for the first time since it was founded in 1933.
Wintershall, Germany’s largest crude oil and natural gas pro-ducer is currently expanding its activities in the Gulf Region. “We intend to continue on our successful growth course and the Middle East region is becoming increasingly important in our diversified portfolio,” Dr. Rainer Seele, Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors of Wintershall, ex-plained. The company is active in exploration block 4 in Qatar. This block is in direct proximity to the North Field, the world's largest natural gas field. In addition, Germany’s largest crude oil and natural gas producer is also the operator in block 3, where exploration wells are planned for the coming years. At around 26 trillion cubic meters, Qatar has the world's third largest reserves of natural gas, after Russia and Iran.
In May 2010 a memorandum was signed with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) which allows Wintershall to conduct long-term exploration and development of a deposit in the western region of the Emirate. Wintershall has also opened a local office in Abu Dhabi – the first by a German E&P company in the Emirate. Abu Dhabi is considered one of the most important centers of the oil and gas business in the Gulf Region. “We now want to get more actively involved in long-term upstream projects in the Gulf,” Martin Bachmann, Member of the Wintershall Board of Executive Directors with responsibility for Exploration and Production, explained. The combination of modern exploration techniques and innovative production methods for enhanced recovery from increasingly complex deposits – this is the strategy that Wintershall has applied successfully worldwide.
Crude oil production with the biopolymer schizophyllan
Against this backdrop Wintershall is presenting its largest research project currently, the biopolymer schizophyllan, which it is working on together with BASF, at the WPC. This project focuses on a fungus (schizophyllum com-mune) which generates a biopolymer as it grows. This biopolymer can be applied as an entirely organic thickening agent, thus opening up new pros-pects for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The recovery rate of a deposit can be increased significantly with this method – moreover, it can be done in an environmentally friendly way, for the biopolymer is 100% biologically de-gradable.
As well as presenting its activities in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, Wintershall employees from Libya will also attend the event in Doha: Wintershall began production operations in the Libyan Desert again in October. The BASF subsidiary will also present its Remote Controlled Operations (RCO) project in the southern North Sea. 20 of the 27 platforms operated there are controlled centrally by radio from Den Helder in the Netherlands. This not only allows smaller and medium-sized offshore deposits to be developed commercially, it also enables operations to be run safely and
ecologically.
Source: Wintershall
www.wintershall.com
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