Increasing Production of Oil: EOR Technologies (Part I)

The issue of increasing production of oil is really hot these days. Mainly because, current level of technologies makes it possible to get more oil without drilling – just utilizing existing wells. It was reported earlier, that by injecting carbon dioxide into depleted oil fields, the United States could recover an extra 67 billion barrels of oil and simultaneously trap 18 billion tons of manmade greenhouse gases safely underground. 

“Enhanced Oil Recovery (abbreviated EOR) is a generic term for techniques for increasing the amount of crude oil that can be extracted from an oil field. Enhanced oil recovery is also called improved oil recovery or tertiary recovery (as opposed to primary and secondary recovery)”  – this is the best (to my understanding definition) of Wikipedia.

This impressive slide shows:

 Source: CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery. Institute for 21st Century Energy | U.S. Chamber of Commerce

However, before looking into EOR it is advisable to look into advanced IOR and best practices. There are some ways to increase oil recovery before deploying EOR. A useful experience is accumulated by Saudi Aramco. 

Some of these include (more details in the links):

• Deployment of maximum reservoir contact wells (MRC),
• Intelligent autonomous fields,
• Gigacell simulation,
• Deep diagnostics (ability to see inside the reservoir with clarity),
• Advanced monitoring and surveillance technologies.

 While this post in a concise way describes EOR, I would like to present classification of EOR – these are from different authors, and slightly different:

 

According to Shell, the history of EOR began in the 30-ies with trials of steam injection, next decade saw gas injections, in the 50-es first thermal projects, and since 60-is the story begins its full swing. By 80-ies enormous interest was generated in EOR due to oil price escalation – this was till 90-ies when oil prices had fallen and with prices growth over the last 5 years the interest in EOR projects became global.

Over the last decade total world oil production from EOR is around 3,000,000 bpd – that is about 3.5% of all world (approx. 85,000,000 bpd). That means that EOR practical utilization is in its infancy. According to various data, EOR market volume is now $126 billion and is expected to quadruple by 2020.

These are major characteristics of EOR applications:

• The projects usually are of a large scope and involve usage of infrastructure. They require a big investment upfront and have relatively long payback periods.
• It takes a while to implement them.
• For each of the project – a specific technology is used
• The average cost 20-25 $/Bbl (Excluding royalty)
• After implementation production response does not occur immediately. In case of CO2 EOR: first additional oil may be produced only after a year from CO2 injection; while the peak of production may be in 5 years
• As the rule, the governments provide tax incentives

 Source: EOR – The Time is Now. Paul L. Bondor, Society of Petroleum Engineers Distinguished Lecturer Program

This ends the first part. In my next parts I will briefly look at available technologies; and what is going on in Indonesia