In an era of high oil prices, declining production, and increasing demand, a number of technologies to enhance production have become increasingly viable. Steam injection is one such EOR (enhance oil recovery) technique. Although steam injection/flood has been used for decades in California and Indonesia, the technique has never been used globally and certainly not within the Gulf region. However, even the oil-rich Gulf needs to look to its long-term future and consider some of the heavy oil deposits once thought undesirable and uneconomic. Steam makes sense in the region due to the regionally available cheap gas and plentiful solar power which can be used to generate steam much more economically than many other oil-producing regions of the world.

Oman is blessed with a number of heavy oil reservoirs which are prime candidates for steam injection. Mukhaizna in the south of Oman is already running one of the world’s largest steam injection programs.

In order to bring the best steam surveillance technology to the region, Falcon spent many months travelling the globe, visiting the existing pockets of experience. Our conclusion was that the existing technology was dated and had failed to evolve in line with logging technology and techniques elsewhere. It was suited to the low-output wells in the suburban environment of Bakersfield (California) but it was not up to the mark for the much more complex reservoirs which exist in the harsh and remote operating environment of the Omani desert and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.

As a result, Falcon decided to re-engineer the existing surveillance technology using its own logging experience combined with the know-how of a renowned steam EOR expert. The resulting tools and technology are a leap forward from anything else in the marketplace both in terms of the measurement and the reliability of the product.

No other equipment was designed with the remote Arabian Desert in mind. Remember, if we have a failure we cannot drive down the freeway to Radio Shack for a spare part!