More than 150 industry experts took part in the opening day of the first Heavy Oil World Mena 2010.

The conference, which is looking at ways of accessing more than 1,000 billion barrels of untapped oil resources across the region, is examining how developing technology, which has already been used elsewhere in the world can be applied to the region to practically double hydrocarbon reserves in the region.

'In this first event we are trying to focus on about four or five countries in the region where we believe there is potential to develop heavy oil over a period of time,' said organiser terrapinn project director David Beguely.

'We chose Bahrain as the venue because while it is not a major producer it is clearly a geographic hub for the region.

'We run major conferences for the industry and what we were picking up at our conference in Abu Dhabi last year is that the regional industry is now interested in looking at the technology that can access heavy oil which in the past has been unavailable to it,' he said.

'Technology has been advancing in this field and recently has been moving forward fast and with the oil price rising and stabilising in the past year the potential for exploiting these resources has become more attractive.

'There are already a number of projects looking at tackling the problem of recovering heavy oil which could come to fruition over the next few years as the current oil price makes this economic,' he added.

'There is a lot of unpublished data about prospective reserves in these fields that can be built on and the technology which has been developed in places like Canada can now be applied to fields in this region.'-TradeArabia News Service