As a mature oilfield, Rumaila’s reservoirs are changing, with much of its remaining recoverable oil locked in increasingly complex geological formations. After 60 years of extracting oil, gas and water, the pressure levels in the reservoirs are declining; failure to address this issue would see the field’s oil production fall by several hundred thousand barrels every single day. This is because of the natural process of base decline, which is common to all oilfields (although decline rates vary in different reservoirs according to geological factors).

We are overcoming Rumaila’s base decline by:

• reintroducing pressure into the reservoirs by injecting industrially treated water (read more here)
• deploying large-scale engineering solutions (read more here)
• delivering an expansive wells strategy (read more here).

Many of Rumaila’s facilities and associated pipework are 40-50 years old, resulting in the need to continue to maintain and modernise these older facilities. Planned water injection improves the production rate, but this means more water is coming out of Rumaila’s wells, resulting in facilities now having to separate more than 500,000 barrels of water a day from the oil produced. Rumaila has never seen this level of water in its 60-year history. This places even more strain on older facilities, not designed to cope with such large volumes of water.

Find out more about how we are addressing these on our field renewal page and how we are building a technologically more advanced digital oilfield here.

The pandemic has been extremely challenging for everyone at Rumaila. Read more about some of the stories of how staff overcame and continued to work in challenging conditions here.

Our number one priority is the health and safety of Rumaila’s people. Rumaila’s response included:

• health and safety measures quickly introduced to mitigate transmission rates within the field
• tens of thousands of face masks, gloves and hand sanitizers provided at all sites, with guidance on how to use
• PPE supplies provided to local hospitals and support given to communities living close and within the field
• Rumaila HQ locked down with strict isolating of international staff to prevent the risk of transmission to the field
• clear and continuous prevention and behavioural guidance to staff through email, posters and medical team site visits with tracking software set up to monitor COVID-19 statistics across Rumaila.

In addition, IT solutions were swiftly rolled out to facilitate remote working for both Iraqi and international office-based colleagues.