The National IOR Centre provides solutions for improved oil recovery on the Norwegian continental shelf through academic excellence and close cooperation with the industry.
About us
Awarded by the Research Council of Norway after a national competition, the Centre started up in December 2013. The Centre's goal is to develop new knowledge and technology in order to increase recovery beyond projections under today’s field operation plans.
The IOR Centre is led by University of Stavanger, with research institutes NORCE and IFE as core partners. Several other research groups, and 9 oil and service companies, complete the Centre's list of partners and collaborators.
The Centre will contribute to the implementation of environmentally friendly technologies for improving oil recovery on the Norwegian continental shelf. Please visit the research submenu for a detailed overview of our research tasks and projects.
Secondary objectives include:
- Robust upscaling of recovery mechanism observed on pore and core scale to field scale
- Optimal injection strategies based on total oil recovered, economic and environmental impact
- Educating some 30 PhDs and 20 postdocs during the eight-year period
Our research
Mobile and immobile oil / EOR
Understanding, modeling, and upscaling the microscopic and macroscopic displacement efficiency when various EOR fluids are injected into a porous rock.
Reservoir characterisation
Theme 2 works with the integration of field data such as pressure, temperature, seismic data, tracer data, geophysical data, and geological data into a field scale simulation model.
Education and training
Students, PhD candidates and postdocs play a vital part in The National IOR Centre of Norway. No less than 25 per cent of the Centre's budget is reserved for education and training.
Delivery Forums
IORCoreSim
IORCoreSim is a tool for simulating the combined effect of low salinity water injection and polymer flooding on oil recovery.
IORCoreSim can help reduce the amount of polymer used when producing oil, thus saving the environment and achieving better utilization of the oil reservoir. For this work, PhD student Oddbjørn Nødland and senior scientist Arild Lohne at NORCE won SR-bank's Innovation Prize 2017.
IORCoreSim has been developed in the Centre. It was previously known as BugSim, a simulator for predicting the behavior of microbes during water flooding. The tool is unique in the sense that it can simulate the combined effect of low salinity water injection and polymer flooding on oil recovery.
Senior scientist Arild Lohne has been the main developer. During the Centre lifetime Lohne has added functionality to simulate the injection of non-Newtonian fluids, such as polymers. Professor Aksel Hiorth has added functionality to simulate geochemical interactions. Lohne's and Hiorth's former PhD student Oddbjørn Nødland has improved the numerical codes and tested the simulator against core scale experiments. Nødland is now a postdoc in the Centre.
IOR Centre disputations
Field scale evaluation and history matching
The economic feasibility of implementing new IOR methods on a field needs to be evaluated, preferably taking the uncertainty in the reservoir description into account.
While optimizing future production, environmental constraints need to be considered. The evaluation will be based on history matched reservoir models. An important focus in this research area is to develop better methods for full field history matching using 4-D seismic data. The history matching is done using ensemble-based methods, but we consider use of different types of seismic data for inversion. Some focus is on compacting reservoirs. Here we both study how to improve the interpretation of 4D seismic data for the location of water and pressure fronts and investigate the coupling between fluid flow and geomechanics linking 4D seismic observations to stress exchange in the reservoir and surrounding rock. A substantial part of the work on history matching is using real data, an open data set for the Norne field and data from Ekofisk that has been made available for selected studies within the IOR Centre.
The Centre's first full field study on history matching utilizing 4D seismic data has been successfully completed. The chosen field was the Norne field, using the data set available for research purposes. The results are being presented in different forums, and are attracting attention, as it demonstrates a full workflow for assisted history matching using 4D seismic data.
IOR Centre news articles
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Management team
Department of Energy Resources
Department of Energy Resources
Department of Energy Resources
