OREANDA-NEWS. December 12, 2012. Supervisory Board of Salym Petroleum Development N.V. (SPD) approved the go ahead for a pilot on using new technology that enables to enhance oil recovery by chemical flooding with ASP. The ASP field pilot will be undertaken in the Salym group of fields in Western Siberia in 2013-2015.

ASP is a promising enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method based on injection of alkali, surfactant and polymer targeting at the residual oil that remains undeveloped after a conventional waterflood.

“ASP together with Bazhenov development is an important cornerstone of our strategy based on safe and efficient oil delivery. The successful ASP field pilot enables us to demonstrate the advantages of this technology in practice and to show how we can change the game developing natural resources in significantly more sustainable way. – SPD CEO Simon Durkin told. – With changes to the fiscal approach a full field project could be attractive to enhance oil recovery, enable to extend fields life cycle and increase production ensuring benefits to the region, oil companies and the government”.

“The technology has the advantage of being able to utilize the existing oil field infrastructure and could be of wider use across the whole region”, – added SPD New Technologies Manager Yakov Volokitin.

SPD has been studying ASP technology since 2008, conducting a number of laboratory and field tests together with its shareholders Shell and Gazprom Neft. In 2009, SPD conducted a single well chemical tracer test in West Salym and obtained very positive results that demonstrated that 90% of the residual oil saturation after waterflood was mobilized by the ASP flood.