Oil extraction from tight reservoirs begins in Belarus

The commercial extraction of oil from tight reservoirs at horizontal well No. 310g of the Rechitsa deposit has begun for the first time in the history of the Belarusian oil industry, the press service of the Belarusian industrial group Belorusneft told BelTA.

The oil well uses the previously detected Petrikov-Yelets field of the Rechitsa deposit. For a long time this field was believed to be unrecoverable since the appropriate technology was not available. It was in the Rechitsa deposit that the history of the Belarusian oil-extracting industry began 50 years ago. Since then the recoverable oil reserves in traditional collectors have been depleted. However, the upper part of the intersalt complex that has low-penetration collectors contains considerable geological reserves of the so-called tight oil that used to be unrecoverable until recently.

The commercial extraction of such reserves involves special, complicated and expensive technologies. The technologies are based on multiphased hydraulic fracturing that was first tested in Belarus at well No. 310g.

Specialists are cautious in their estimations of how much oil the well can produce. But even the most modest speculations state that the oil reserves can reach 700,000 tonnes. The volume is comparable to the volume of new deposits, which are detected in Belarus. The tight oil is viscous and is unlike the traditional oil produced from the Rechitsa deposit. Specialists said that the extraction of tight oil opens up new oil-extracting horizons for Belarus.

For the sake of better exploitation of the new reserves plans have been made to drill a group of wells with long horizontal sections in the Rechitsa deposit.

The Belarusian industrial group Belorusneft was founded in 1966. The company specializes in the surveying, prospecting and development of oil fields, well drilling, oil and associated petroleum gas extraction in Belarus and a number of other countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Ecuador.