Novel Approach for NORM Scale Removal

Upper Zakum oil field is one of the largest offshore oil fields in the world, located about 80 km off the coast of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The field covers an area of about 1,200 km2 and contains an estimated 50 billion barrels of oil. The field was discovered in 1963 and production started in 1982. One of the challenges of developing Upper Zakum oil field is its shallow depth of 5 to 15 m, which makes conventional drilling and production platforms impractical and costly. To overcome this challenge, ADNOC has implemented an innovative solution of creating four artificial islands to serve as the base for drilling and production facilities. The islands are designed to minimize the environmental impact, maximize oil recovery, and reduce the operational costs. The islands are connected by subsea pipelines and power cables, and equipped with state-of-the-art technologies, such as extended reach drilling, intelligent completions and smart wells Scale deposition is a major flow assurance issue in oil wells that can create facility blockage such as at main export pipelines, at manifolds or even at separators. Additionally, scale deposition can create near-wellbore formation damage which can block the pores of the rock or clog the tubing and perforations. Wettability alteration can also be induced by scale formation in the reservoir. Therefore, scale deposition can reduce production and can cause safety and environmental hazards at surface.