Patrick McGuire

“Enhanced Oil Recovery Report: Ethane May Be The New CO2”

Large-scale EOR projects in far-flung locales—including above the Arctic Circle—have marked the career of Patrick McGuire as an IOR Pioneer. Considered one of the world’s premier expects on miscible flood applications, McGuire’s 27-year career with BP and predecessor ARCO was spent largely on the Alaskan North Slope.

Career path

McGuire managed start-up and multiple large-scale expansions of the Prudhoe Bay Miscible Gas Project (PBMGP), which is the world’s largest enriched gas WAG program. He developed several unconventional and very successful EOR concepts for Prudhoe Bay. McGuire also won the ARCO Corporate Technology award for the North Slope’s Alpine oil field development plan, which successfully implemented a novel scheme for field wide-miscible WAG with horizontal wells at field start-up.He also was a key figure in the characterization of the huge viscous oil resource on North Slope, getting involved with the design and implementation of the West Sak waterflood pilot. He also identified, designed, and implemented large scale, innovative advanced oil recovery projects for Prudhoe Bay, Eileen West End, Aurora, Borealis, Orion, Polaris, Northstar, West Sak, Lisburne, and Milne Point fields—all on the North Slope of Alaska.

As a senior advisor at BP Alaska, McGuire evaluated gas injection opportunities for the entire BP/TNK portfolio in Russia. He developed extensive laboratory programs for equation of state characterization of key Siberian assets and designed WAG pilot programs for several fields. He also developed the curriculum and taught the Gas IOR Masterclass for BP. Earlier in his career, McGuire worked in engineering support positions at Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. He also worked in thermal recovery for ARCO in California’s San Joaquin Valley heavy oil giants. After retiring from BP, he served as lead reservoir engineer at Maersk Oil and Gas for 5 years, where he evaluated gas injection and low salinity-EOR opportunities across Maersk’s worldwide portfolio.

McGuire has continued to evaluate gas injection and low- salinity EOR opportunities in Middle East, Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, Argentina, West Africa, and Brazil. In his current role as Senior Consultant, Reservoir Engineering, at International Reservoir Technologies Inc., he has continued to focus on designing and implementing large-scale EOR projects, including laboratory programs and pilot field tests.

Credentials

McGuire published 24 SPE papers—many of which are considered to be classics in the area of miscible flooding, according to 2008 Pioneer Randy Seright. He was an SPE Distinguished Lecturer during 1998-1999.

He holds BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of New Mexico.