EOR is a process which enables operators to extract oil from reservoirs where conventional methods such as water flood are no longer efficient and less practical to produce the remaining oil.

PDO has invested a great deal of time and money in ground-breaking EOR projects as it looks to boost the overall percentage of oil recovered from its fields. EOR is vital for the Company’s hydrocarbon production sustainability and is expected to account for approximately 25% of PDO oil production by 2025. For this, the Company is currently executing 16 projects and field trials to devise and find the optimum EOR technique for various production fields.

​​The Company’s first full-scale EOR venture was inaugurated in October 2010. The Marmul project in the south of its concession area – where polymer has been added as a thickening agent to water and injected into the field to sweep oil to producing wells - was the first of its type in the Middle East.

The Company is breaking new ground with major projects involving the three advanced EOR techniques: miscible gas injection, thermal recovery and chemical. PDO is one of the few oil companies in the world employing all the three main available technologies at full scale. This in return ensures that oil and gas production remains an important contributor to Oman’s economy and that we can continue to play our part in meeting the world’s energy needs well into the future.

The miscible gas injection (MGI) technique consists of injecting a gas or a mixture of gases that mix completely (or become miscible) with the reservoir oil. This miscible displacement process maintains the reservoir pressure and eliminates or significantly reduces the interfacial tension between gas and oil.

Among the thermal EOR projects being executed in Oman is PDO’s Qarn Alam project, which became a global first when it began full operations in 2010 due to its use of the pioneering TAGOGD technique – thermally assisted gas-oil gravity drainage in fractured carbonate rock.

How a thickening agent can be used to boost oil production​​​

PDO broke new ground at Marmul in the south of its concession area when it injected polymer as a thickening agent into water to make it thicker and more viscous giving it a closer mobility to crude oil and thereby making it easier to push oil out. The injected polymer improves lateral and vertical sweep of oil by water and thus helps recovering more oil.