GlassPoint—The Leader in Solar Enhanced Oil Recovery
GlassPoint manufactures solar steam generators for the oil and gas industry worldwide. GlassPoint systems are designed specifically to operate in harsh oilfield environments and deliver class-leading price-performance. The company is backed by strategic investors Royal Dutch Shell and the State General Reserve Fund, the largest sovereign wealth fund in the Sultanate of Oman. With headquarters in Fremont, California, regional offices in Muscat, Oman, Kuwait City, Kuwait and Shenzhen, China, GlassPoint is leading the commercial deployment of solar enhanced oil recovery (EOR) globally.
The energy industry is at a crossroads. Production from existing reservoirs is declining and the cost of finding and developing new reserves is growing exponentially. It is more important than ever to maximize production from existing resources.
GlassPoint’s solar steam generators provide customers in the oil and gas industry with the most cost-effective source of thermal energy for EOR. The result:
- Save valuable natural gas resources
- Generate jobs and boost economic development
- Reduce carbon emissions and achieve regulatory compliance
The Oil Production Challenge
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts an increase in global oil demand of 2% per annum, but production from existing capacities is shrinking at double that rate. An enormous gap is opening-up between the amount of oil that is required and the amount of oil that is currently in production. That means, by 2015, the oil industry will have to add new production capacity equal to double the current production of Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest producer of oil. By 2035, eight times Saudi Arabia’s current production will need to be brought online in order to satisfy the world’s demand for more oil. To fill this gap, oil operators worldwide are investing in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR).
Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is the future of oil production
The number and size of new oil discoveries has been declining for decades, so where is the additional oil going to come from? If new discoveries are not the answer, then more oil must be produced from existing fields. The most common way to boost oil production from an aging field is by injecting high-pressure steam, known as thermal EOR . Over the next few decades, a lot more thermal EOR will be applied to the world’s oil fields.
Normally, the steam required for EOR is produced by burning immense amounts of natural gas. With gas now a valuable energy commodity, oil producers would much rather sell the gas than burn it to heat up the ground. In many oil producing states, especially in the Persian Gulf region, there is a shortage of natural gas. Of the six countries in the GCC, only Qatar is a net gas exporter. All others are importers of gas.
Solar steam is the future of EOR
Most of the world’s oil fields are in sunny locations, like the Middle East or California, creating the possibility of producing steam for EOR using concentrated sunlight. Unfortunately, the high price of solar steam has limited its use for EOR to a small number of experimental installations, such as the one created in Southern California by ARCO in the 1980s.
GlassPoint has developed a solar steam generator specifically for EOR that produces steam at costs competitive with steam produced by burning natural gas. By breaking this price barrier, GlassPoint has created the market for solar EOR, allowing operators to reduce costs, reduce emissions and save gas for higher value applications.
GlassPoint’s solar EOR solution is cost-competitive with natural gas today
After the development of a successful prototype unit in China in 2010, GlassPoint’s solar steam generators are being deployed at oil fields worldwide. In February 2011, GlassPoint unveiled the world’s first commercial solar EOR project at a 100-year old oil field operated by Berry Petroleum in McKittrick, California. Then, in early 2013, GlassPoint commissioned a larger project with Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), a 7 MW solar steam generator in Southern Oman. PDO, the largest oil and gas producer in Oman, is a joint venture of The Sultanate of Oman, Shell and Total. Both projects have been operating successfully and serve as performance baselines for large-scale commercial projects.
USE LESS GAS FOR EOR
During the day, steam produced with solar energy reduces the amount of natural gas burned to fuel the oilfield’s Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) operations. However, because oil is produced both day and night, solar steam generators are used in combination with fuel-fired steam generators to produce steam on a 24-hour basis. A number of different integration strategies are possible:
Constant Rate Steaming
During the day, solar steam is produced, and at night, gas is burned to produce steam. The fuel-fired and solar steam generators both run from the same feed water and produce the same temperature, pressure and quality of steam. Automatic control systems vary the firing-rate of the fuel-fired steam generator to maintain a constant rate of steam injection both day and night.
Most fuel-fired steam generators have a minimum firing rate of around 30%, which means that during daytime solar can provide at most 70% of the steam required. At night, when there is no solar steam, the fuel-fired steam generators provide 100% of the steam required. The net result is that solar can reduce fuel consumption by around 25% on an annual basis.
Variable Rate Steaming
In this configuration, the same amount of steam is injected as in the Constant Rate case, but more is steam generated during the day, and less at night. This variable-rate steam strategy allows solar to provide a larger percentage of the overall steam requirement. To achieve this, the fuel-fired generators are configured to run at a constant “base rate” both day and night. However, during the day, solar generated steam is produced in addition to the base rate of fuel-fired steam, so that more steam is generated by day (base rate + solar) than at night (base rate alone). The maximum reduction in gas use depends on the exact characteristics of the reservoir, but in most cases fuel consumption can be reduced by up to 80% using this technique.
It has been shown that oil production is not affected by variable rate steam injection. Because of the huge thermal mass of the oil formation, the amount of oil produced depends solely on the total amount of steam injected, not the hours in which it is injected