Oil

Beginning in the late 1990s, this bold project has showcased our ability to develop the gigantic extra-heavy oil reserves in Venezuela's Orinoco Belt. The challenge required the input and expertise of both production and refining specialists.

Colossal potential

PetroCedeño, formerly Sincor, is a project as ambitious as the technological challenge it presents, namely the production and large-scale upgrading of the extra-heavy oil resources in Venezuela's Orinoco Belt, home to recoverable unconventional reserves appraised at some 270 billion barrels. This huge project alone is sitting on estimated reserves of 36 billion barrels, of which 2.4 billion are thought to be recoverable using current technologies.

A bold gamble

Of the four projects that emerged in the Orinoco Belt in the late 1990s, PetroCedeño is the most ambitious and bold. Drawing on our extraction and refining know-how, it is the only one to be fully integrated, spanning the entire chain from the production of extra-heavy oil to its upgrading into a high-quality light synthetic crude. This technological choice confers undeniable value added on the project, because it delivers an end-product oil that can be processed by conventional refineries and sold directly in international marketplaces by traders. The project's end-to-end scope was matched by substantial capital spending. At the time, it was both the largest industrial investment ever made in Venezuela and Total's biggest capital project.

Pushing technologies to their limit

To begin producing extra-heavy oil profitably on a large scale, PetroCedeño had to push recovery techniques to their limit. The task involved producing the highly viscous, nearly immobile oil and piping it to a gigantic processing plant 220 kilometers distant from the Zuata production facility. The project leveraged the full range of E&P's expertise, from geosciences to operational specialties. Conventional production techniques had to be pushed to the limit to meet this major challenge, which Total did by conducting extremely elaborate studies to thoroughly map the reservoirs' complex architecture, drilling extended-reach horizontal wells whose trajectories were optimized in real time during boring, designing an innovative, bottomhole diluent injection system, and developing innovative pumps to bring the viscous fluids up to the surface.

One of the biggest conversion units in the world

The extra-heavy oil extracted from Zuata is converted into a light synthetic crude, Zuata Sweet, at an enormous conversion facility called an upgrader. The largest of its kind, the upgrader, installed in Jose on the Caribbean coast, was the biggest ever oil industry project when built. An essential technology, it removes the excess carbon from the extra-heavy oil, while producing some 6,000 metric tons of coke a day. The upgrader processes nearly 200,000 barrels of oil per day into around 170,000 barrels of Zuata Sweet, bolstering Venezuela's oil export capacity.

Exemplary project management

An industrial adventure of immense scope, PetroCedeño entailed 54 million man-hours, 34 contractors, and 10,000 people of 18 different nationalities onsite. Despite its exceptional scale, the project was completed on schedule and on budget. Launched in 1998, PetroCedeño began producing extra-heavy oil in December 2000. The first commercial cargo of Zuata Sweet was shipped to the United States in March 2002.

New challenges

With the wide array of innovations deployed by PetroCedeño to extract extra-heavy oil, roughly 8% of the oil trapped in the reservoirs can now be recovered. Because we are determined to boost that percentage, however, we will be testing three innovative new hot, or thermal, production techniques in 2011. Steam will be injected into the reservoirs to make the oil more fluid, potentially doubling the recovery rate.