Andrew Cockin graduated from Coventry University with a degree in civil engineering. He became a chartered engineer three years later before embarking on a master鈥檚 course in petroleum engineering at Imperial College London. He has worked at BP since 1983.
Since the early 1950s, water flooding 鈥� or pumping water down 鈥渋njection鈥� wells into the reservoir 鈥� has been a common approach for pushing more oil to the surface. Yet even with this tactic, on average, drilling only taps around a third of the store of hydrocarbons 鈥� the long-chain molecules that make up crude oil 鈥� held in a reservoir.
As technology innovation leader in BP鈥檚 aptly titled Pushing Reservoir Limits (PRL) group, it is Andrew Cockin and his colleagues鈥� job to find inventive solutions that increase the amount of oil delivered to the production wells.
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In order to develop these next generation technologies, Cockin spends his days reviewing the details of the oil wells in the many places BP operates and keeping up to date with the latest research.
鈥淚 try to link solutions to problems,鈥� he says. This often involves meeting the reservoir engineers, who know the details of their oil fields intricately, and organising workshops with researchers from academia and BP鈥檚 own R&D team. He describes this as 鈥渇acilitating imaginations running wild鈥�.
A technology known as is one of the innovations Cockin implemented. Simply flooding an oil reservoir with water misses a lot of the oil because the water will always take the path of least resistance. To make it more efficient, the PRL team realised they needed to close off the easy paths so that the water is forced to push out more of the oil. But how could this be done? The solution came in the form of 鈥渁 long-chain molecule, wrapped up like a tiny ball of wool and added to the water鈥�, describes Cockin. It starts out small enough to get through the pores in the sandstone but expands by a factor of 10 when heated. Since the sandstone layers are bordered above and below by hot, oil-bearing rock, this heat is enough to block the sandstone pores and hinder the subsequent flow of water through the channel.
Bright Water was first developed in 1997 but the technology wasn鈥檛 ready for deployment in BP鈥檚 wells until 2005. 鈥淚t takes a lot of endurance and tenacity to keep going鈥� on these long-term projects, says Cockin. Since then, he estimates that the technique has increased the oil production rate of a well by up to 50 per cent.