Recovery Rate

Enhanced oil recovery is like CPR and a pacemaker to an oil field on the brink of death. Once-vibrant wells whose production had declined to a trickle can be amazingly revived when “flooded” with large volumes of CO2. With continued injections of CO2, those higher production levels can be maintained for years on end. But CO2-EOR requires CO2—lots of it—and the number of mature oil fields that can benefit from EOR is limited by the amount of CO2 that can be produced and piped to where it’s needed. In today’s blog, we continue our look at the Rodney Dangerfield of crude oil production techniques.

A lot of the big run-up in U.S. crude oil production since 2010 is tied to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the Eagle Ford, the Bakken and other tight-oil plays. But while oil from shale and other reservoirs with very low permeability has grabbed the headlines, crude production from enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in older conventional oil fields—especially using CO2 flooding techniques--is on the rise. Crude production from CO2-based EOR operations could more than double by 2020 (to 600 Mb/d or higher), providing yet another boost to U.S. energy independence. In today’s blog, we begin a look at enhanced oil recovery, with a focus on techniques that use large volumes of carbon dioxide.