Abstract
Historically, the co-softhyphen;produced hot water has been an inconvenience and a disposal issue for oilfield operators. This paper focuses on brine or coproduced fluids (hot aqueous fluids produced during oil and gas production) as a potential source for electricity generation, which could be produced from the thermal energy available in the produced fluid. Oil and Gas (O&G) industry today is in possession of thousands of established wells with known temperatures and flows which can be used for producing emissions-free and cost-competitive electricity using binary cycle units.
Power generation from coproduced fluids using a binary-cycle power plant is underway at the Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center in Wyoming and being considered in locations in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Arkansas. Although currently there is no electricity generated from coproduced fluids in India, various studies, suggest that the oil and gas fields in the Cambay Basin basin have a promising geothermal gradient of 35-40 °C/km, while (Chakravorty et.al, 2008) reports around 88% water cut for production from Jhalora Oilfield in Mehsana Asset, North Cambay Basin. This combination of favorable geothermal gradient and large volume of water produced is promising for electricity generation from these coproduced fluids.
In this paper, we studied and collated data of Jhalora Field in Mehsana asset of Cambay Basin for coproduction electricity generation and attempt to provide an estimate of the coproduced-water-electricity-generation potential of that field using two different approaches.
The most significant parameters to economic viability for such a project include reservoir temperature as well as total fluid production rate. The reservoir temperature of Jhalora Field is 90-100°C and with produced water flow rate of 5096m3/day, it is a suitable candidate for application of this technology.
