Heavy oil challenges: transport, blending, and marketing

OTC paper describing a successful downstream approach for the transmission and refining of Hydro's Grane field heavy crude.

In my recent blog, Hart E&P article on Norway's heavy oil Grane Field, we highlighted an integrated upstream approach to well planning, reservoir characterization, and monitoring that has allowed Norsk Hydro to successfully produce the heavy oil Grane field. We also discussed in our recent Expert Viewpoint feature article how there continues to be challenges and disconnects between upstream and downstream segments that need to be overcome to improve the end to end efficiency and economics of heavy oil operations.

As a follow-up, I found the OTC article Heavy Oil Challenges (c) 2006, Offshore Technology Conference ties these points together with a good overview of how Hydro has integrated their upstream technologies and processes with an equally comprehensive downstream approach to deal with the challenges associated with the pipeline transmission, refining, and marketing of Grane heavy oil crude.

In short this is a good example of the potential synergies between upstream and downstream segments in having an integrated well to refinery operations strategy.

Jorge.