Events

Reza Fassihi, BHP Billiton Petroleum, will present a lecture entitled "Feasibility of EOR Application in an Offshore Environment" as part of the Claude R. Hocott Graduate Seminar Series.

Abstract: 

In the past few years, there has been tremendous progress in finding and producing from deep offshore reservoirs.  However, the Industry has focused mostly on accelerated production to recover the high cost of finding this oil.  Hence, maximizing reserves has not been the focus for most of the operators.  However, with the progressive drop in exploration success in finding additional resources in deep offshore, the operators are warming up to the idea of increasing recovery factor from the existing offshore fields.

In this talk, I will review the applicability of EOR methods to deep offshore fields.  Then, I will discuss the benefits and limitations of these methods and present some new technologies that potentially mitigate the offshore limitations.  Among the EOR applications, natural gas injection seems to have a high chance of success.  So, I will review some preliminary modeling results that indicate miscible behavior accompanied with a high recovery factor.  Finally, I will discuss plans for implementing such a project in an offshore field in GOM. 

Bio:

Reza Fassihi has over 30 years of experience in petroleum research and development, as well as field application of reservoir management best practices. He is currently working for BHP Billiton Petroleum in Houston where, as a Distinguished Advisor, he is responsible for providing assurance on global subsurface projects and use of best practices in production forecasting for both conventional and unconventional reservoirs. Dr. Fassihi has a broad experience on design, plan and execution of waterflood and EOR projects. His expertise includes reservoir simulation, thermal recovery, SCAL methodology and integration, well testing, reserves estimation, depletion planning, surveillance, and unconventional resource development.

Education:               10/77-03/81            Ph.D. in Petroleum Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

                               09/76-10/77            MS in Chemical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

                               10/72-05/76            BS in Chemical Engineering, Abadan Institute of Technology, Abadan,Iran.

Key Awards:
Winner of the best paper presented at the 1988 CIM Meeting.
Winner of the SPE Student Paper Contest, PhD Division (1980).
SPE Distinguished Lecturer
Over 40 reviewed publications