The Oil Drum

47 comments on An oilfield in Arabia

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GreyZone on August 16, 2006 - 12:29pm

Claims are made that it will increase recovery but for a reference case, I refer you to Yibal. EOR did not increase total oil by much (though it may have increased it very slightly) but what it did do was crash production through the floor when decline set in. Another case is the North Sea, both UK and Norwegian production. EOR there appears to have increased recovered oil by some amount but the North Sea peaked in 1998 or 1999 (can't recall which offhand) versus a predicted peak in 2010 by the EOR advocates. The North Sea has been in steady decline since its peak and is down significantly from there. I am not aware of any examples where EOR has really proven to increase recovered reserves by a significant percentage of original estimates of total oil though there ought to at least be a few if the technology actually does what is claimed rather than just draining the field faster.

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memmel on August 16, 2006 - 1:04pm

As mentioned before it does allow tight formation to be produced so it opens up new production.

Next it works well for extracting bypassed oil but the original estimates that I have seen seem to assume that bypassed oil is not a factored into the overall recovery.

But agian these methods in general seem to trade increased production rates for massive decline rates later since they basically increase the rate of depletion.

Wich in a bottom up anaylisis leads to a increasing rate of decline in production rates once depletion finally catches up.