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ETABLISSEMENT PAU LACQ
Awarded by the SPE (Society of Petroleum Engineers), the IOR Pioneer Award is the most coveted honor in the field of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). Stéphane Jouenne, an engineer at TotalEnergies, has become a world-renowned expert in EOR, and is one of the four recipients of the award for 2024.
Earlier this year, when Stéphane Jouenne, currently R&D Coordinator of CO₂ capture projects, received an e-mail informing him that he was to receive the IOR Pioneer Award, he thought it was either a prank or a mistake. “I’d always thought that this award, which is like the Holy Grail for EOR researchers, was given more to academic researchers who had worked all their lives on the subject. It never crossed my mind that I might have the right profile.” And yet on April 25, 2024, in Tulsa (Oklahoma), Stéphane received the IOR Pioneer Award from Randy Seright, Senior Engineer and expert in EOR by polymer injection at the University of New Mexico, and Chairman of the Awards Committee. "Between 2005 and 2020, Stéphane Jouenne did some incredible laboratory work. He made significant progress on the issues of polymer and transport and injection," Randy Seright affirms. EOR technology helps accelerate and improve oil recovery in reservoirs, while reducing the carbon footprint of production.
From left, IOR Pioneers Stephane Jouenne, Baojun Bai, Mojdeh Delshad, and Varadarajan Dwarakanath,
and Awards Committee Chairman Randy Seright.
A passionate researcher
This "International honor", awarded to Stéphane Jouenne, is the opportunity to look back over 15 years of a career dedicated to Polymer flooding technology, i.e. the injection of water viscosified by polymers. A method studied as from the middle of the 1970s to recover more oil - using conventional technologies, no more than 30-40% of the oil present in the reservoir is recovered – to produce faster and to reduce the carbon footprint of oil extraction. In 2005, the young 25-year-old process engineer and Doctor in Physical Chemistry of Polymers, was hired by TotalEnergies as head of laboratory at the PERL (Platform for Experimental Research in Lacq). "A few months after I arrived, I was involved in the preparation of the first deep offshore polymer flooding test for TotalEnergies, on Dalia, Angola. I soon began investing my time and energy in the topic, which filled my days and nights for the 15 years that followed! In the laboratory, we started working on the quality control of the polymer chain and making the new recovery method more reliable: we had to cover the injection process, the degradation in the injection lines and the reservoir, the impact during production, etc.". The test in Angola was a world first and lasted three years (2009-2011). A sampling well followed, to confirm the results of the pilot. In the wake of the pilot, Stéphane Jouenne and his team contributed to other TotalEnergies projects. The latest to date is the polymer flooding pilot in the United Arab Emirates with ADNOC.
Pioneering spirit
Passionate about his subject, Stéphane Jouenne stayed at the PERL for 15 years, whereas most engineers in the Company change jobs every three years. "Even though I was working on the same topic, I kept discovering new themes. To appraise enhanced oil recovery overall, you have to look at the entire oil and gas chain: drilling wells, the injection, production and separation facilities, water treatment, forecasting oil recovery, etc. Understanding all the interactions, looking at the fine details, and so on - it was an extremely enriching and highly motivating time in my career." He received the IOR Pioneer Award for his contribution to the enhanced oil recovery industry. "It’s an individual award that I would like to share with all the colleagues who contributed to this wonderful adventure." A reward in keeping with the “pioneer spirit” that has always defined TotalEnergies. He also mentions that developing skills on a subject gives you inroads into all sorts of other issues. During the COVID pandemic for example, Stéphane and his former colleagues from the PERL, transposed the techniques developed to measure the viscosity of the polymer solutions injected into oil fields, to the measurement of blood viscosity for medical diagnoses¹.
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