Rhourde El Baguel Oil Field (REB) is an

oil field A petroleum reservoir or oil and gas reservoir is a subsurface accumulation of hydrocarbons contained in porous or fractured rock formations. Such reservoirs form when kerogen (ancient plant matter) is created in surrounding rock by the presence ...

located in Ouargla Province, Algeria. It was discovered in 1963 by Edward Chittick under Sinclair International and developed by

ARCO ARCO ( ) is a brand of gasoline stations currently owned by Marathon Petroleum after BP sold its rights. BP commercializes the brand in Northern California, Oregon and Washington, while Marathon has rights for the rest of the United States an ...

(now part of BP) and

Sonatrach Sonatrach ( ar, سوناطراك; french: Société Nationale pour la Recherche, la Production, le Transport, la Transformation, et la Commercialisation des Hydrocarbures) is the national state-owned oil company of Algeria. Founded in 1963, it is ...

in 1996. API oil (40.2 Deg) is produced from a Cambrian formation at a depth of . It is the second largest field in Algeria. REB's recovery rate declined to 18% of its maximum by 1995. In 1996, it was producing less than 25,000 barrels per day. On February 15, 1996, ARCO signed a 25-year

production sharing contract Production sharing agreements (PSAs) or production sharing contracts (PSCs) are a common type of contract signed between a government and a resource extraction company (or group of companies) concerning how much of the resource (usually oil) extrac ...

(PSC) valued at $1.3 billion with Algeria. In 1995 it paid a signature bonus of $225m and agreed to pay a $300m entrance fee. It was to invest in an

enhanced oil recovery Enhanced oil recovery (abbreviated EOR), also called tertiary recovery, is the extraction of crude oil from an oil field that cannot be extracted otherwise. EOR can extract 30% to 60% or more of a reservoir's oil, compared to 20% to 40% using ...

system and further development, including 38 new wells, but this work did not take place. After acquiring ARCO, BP raised the field's output by gas injection to 85,000 b/d peak for a few months in early 2000. Encouraged by this success, BP decided to increase the pressure of the injected gas to optimize the production. This led to a total failure and cracks inside the field. Its sustainable capacity was never more than 18,000 b/d. As of 2011, production averaged 20,000 b/d. The EOR technique failed due to the existence of cracks in the bottom well rock formation that led to the loss of the majority of the oil reserves. BP and Sonatrach are going through

arbitration Arbitration is a form of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) that resolves disputes outside the judiciary courts. The dispute will be decided by one or more persons (the 'arbitrators', 'arbiters' or 'arbitral tribunal'), which renders the ' ...

over the objectives that were initially set in the PSC and never met by BP. The total proven reserves of field are around 3 billion barrels (410 million tonnes).

References

{{coord missing, Algeria Oil fields in Algeria