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As wells age, brine production rates increase and with it, mineral scale potential. In addition, water management must now consider frac water compatibility, optimum mixing rates for injection waters, and compatibility of brines injected into disposal wells.
 

OLI technology helps you to “turn on the lights” in your reservoir. Using brine-mineral equilibrium principles, it is possible to turn a limited water analysis into a representative brine and also into an accurate scaling scenario.
 

OLI Systems brings 44 years of study of the physical-chemical behavior of electrolytes in water and without water and applies this understanding in software designed specifically for the upstream.

 

OLI upstream technology

Scale and corrosion prediction in a production environment

Requirements by production technologists

 

OLI's upstream software ScaleChem was originally designed by production technologists at Shell (in the 1980s) for production applications. Since then, ScaleChem has become an industry standard in upstream companies for mineral scale prediction. OLI has periodically requested industry participation in joint industry products to update the UI and the technology to state-of-the-art practices. Using the OLI Engine for calculations and a UI that has been most recently specified by OLI's Produced Water Group (a consortium of three oil and gas companies formed in 2010 to update ScaleChem to current practices), ScaleChem is a practical, powerful, easy-to-use, and thorough tool for studying mineral scale problems and solutions overall production conditions and compositions.

 

OLI Engine for upstream applications

 

Electrolyte thermodynamics has been applied to standard scales, exotic scales, and mixed scales in a variety of production scenarios. The MSE framework in the OLI Engine is predictive to 90% of the critical temperature of the solution, 1,500 bar, and has no concentration limit on the amount of ions in the aqueous phase. This makes the OLI Engine, MSE model ideally suited for all kinds of production waters, including heavy brines as well as methanol and MEG-rich phases.  OLI's MSE model has also been improved for hydrocarbon calculations so that a wide variety of oil, gas, and water situations can be simulated.

 

UltraHPHT conditions


There is limited data publicly available at the ultra-high pressures and temperatures that are characteristic of many of today's wells, and this data is needed to develop parameters to accurately simulate upstream HPHT conditions. Therefore, OLI and AQSim have joined with Scaled Solutions and five oil and gas companies to improve OLI predictions for UltraHPHT conditions, by collecting experimental data at these conditions and then developing parameters for the OLI MSE model. This work is in a proprietary phase now, and will be made generally available once the proprietary period is over.

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