Production

Every day, through our production activities in Exploration & Production, we provide the energy for millions of people – for their comfort, their need for mobility, or their passion to travel.

Our portfolio is very diverse in terms of maturity of fields, but most of them are mature fields, which have been producing for decades.

Operating fields which have a long production history come with challenges: increasing the recovery rates and dealing with low productivity per well, while controlling costs. Production decline is natural in mature fields and high investment is needed to mitigate this decline.

Hydrocarbon production in a field can go through three stages as the field matures:

• Primary production: this is used in newer fields, when there is still pressure in the reservoir and oil and gas naturally rise to the surface
• Secondary recovery (improved recovery): specific technologies are used when hydrocarbons from a reservoir no longer flows to the surface and several technologies like water and gas injection are used to increase reservoir pressure.
• Tertiary recovery (enhanced recovery): specific technologies are used to further increase oil production from a reservoir, after the first two stages. These technologies are more expensive to employ in a field.