Equinor and Aker BP announced on October 26 a collaboration to develop tight reservoirs on the Norwegian continental shelf, where the Norwegian Offshore Directorate estimates recoverable potential at about 2.8 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Equinor said the volume is comparable to the expected recoverable resources of the Johan Sverdrup field, one of Norway’s largest producing fields.
The constraint is the rock. Tight reservoirs have low permeability, so oil and gas flow through them very slowly, and conventional methods recover only a limited portion of the resource. The companies put average recovery at 20 percent for oil and 30 percent for gas in limestone reservoirs, and 12 percent for oil and 25 percent for gas in sandstone reservoirs. About 90 discoveries have yet to receive development approval, and many are in tight reservoirs, and many are not economically viable to develop individually with the solutions available today.
The collaboration is designed to change that arithmetic through technology development, standardised approaches and joint work across more than one project, rather than standalone developments for each discovery. No investment figure, project list or production start date was announced, so the agreement is a framework for making a large, difficult resource developable, not a development decision itself.