3.

Enhanced oil recovery

3.2.1 Processes As illustrated in Fig. 1, over the decades, numerous

At the end of development of a field by primary
processes (exploitation of the natural energy) and
secondary processes (water or gas injection to
delay depressurizing), the recovered
hydrocarbons seldom exceed 50% of those
originally present (the OOIP, Oil Originally In
Place). To increase final recovery, some
operations apply Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR)
processes, also called tertiary processes because
in the past they were applied in the third phase of
the productive life of the field.
technologies have been developed that are based on
consolidated chemical-physical principles, but which,
though they have demonstrated their validity and
effectiveness in recovering hydrocarbons in the
laboratory, have never gone beyond the pilot phase of
field application. The complexity of the mechanisms
that characterize these technologies and their costs of
application have in fact precluded, or slowed down,
their systematic development.
EOR processes are traditionally divided into three
main groups (see again Fig. 1): thermal processes
(injection of steam, injection of hot solvents,

Fig. 1. Secondary
improved oil recovery
and tertiary EOR processes.
(secondary)

advanced water gas gas condensate

wells injection injection cycling

pressure maintenance

enhanced oil recovery

(tertiary)

gas miscible/
thermal immiscible chemical others

steam flooding miscible/near polymer flooding microbial EOR

cyclic steam miscible hydrocarbons alkaline/polymer/ electromagnetic
stimulation nitrogen surfactant mechanical (e.g.
hot water carbon dioxide foam mining)
in situ combustion flue gas surfactant gas and water
water-alternate-gas shut-off
geological
sequestration of
gaseous emissions (CO2)

VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY 209

NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
combustion in situ, etc.); gas injection processes
(natural gas, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, etc.); and
chemical processes (injection of surfactants, polymers,
alkaline solutions, etc.).
Other emerging or niche technologies are dealt
with under the heading of ‘Other processes’ (see
below). The foremost EOR technologies that have had
pilot applications in the field are described below. For
more complete details about the physical principles
and the results of applications of these processes, refer
to the bibliography (Donaldson et al., 1985; Green and
Willhite, 1998).
Thermal processes with steam injection
Thermal processes linked with steam injection
were the first ones to be used in the oil industry, as the
earliest fields discovered and saturated by high
viscosity heavy oils occurred at depths of just a few
hundred metres. The main objective of these processes
is to improve the mobility of the oil by reducing its
viscosity through heat exchange. Steam can be
injected into the well itself (cyclic steam stimulation),
which will also function as the production well, or into
a dedicated well, while a second well will act as
producer (steamdrive). A significant example of this
technology is known as the Steam Assisted Gravity
Drainage (SAGD) process, and in the last few years it
has been applied with some frequency. The SAGD
technology is based on drilling two overlying
horizontal wells: the upper one is used for steam
injection while the lower one drains the hot oil towards
production.
With steam injection, the chemical and physical
properties of the oil (viscosity, density, composition
and phase behaviour) undergo changes, as do also
the petrophysical properties of the rock (porosity,
permeability and compressibility). Also modified
are properties of the interactions between the rock
and the fluids (saturation in residual oil, interfacial
tension, wettability, relative permeability, capillary
pressures, etc.).
Other parameters that determine the applicability
of this process, apart from the temperature and the
pressure of the field, regard the structural
characteristics of the formation such as its thickness,
the presence of clay barriers or of heterogeneous
factors that can affect the flow regimes, the geometry
adopted for the injection and production wells, and the
operating conditions, such as the quality and quantity
of the steam available.
In general, steam injection thermal processes are
applied to fields that are between 150 and about 1,500 m
deep and that are around 20 m thick. Greater depths
increase heat losses, reduce the benefits of heat
exchange between the steam and the field fluids (the
210
greater the depth, the higher the temperature of the
field), and increase the risks of damage to facilities due
to the effects of the higher temperature and pressure
the steam must possess (optimal values are between
150 and 200°C). Ideal candidates are fields having high
values for permeability (1,000-4,000 millidarcy) and
porosity (greater than 20%) and with oil saturations
greater than at least 40%. The viscosity of the oil
should be between 200 and 1,000 mPa⭈s and density
between 10 and 30°API.
Thermal processes by combustion in situ
As opposed to the thermal processes using steam,
those based on combustion in situ offer a broader
range of applications, although the management of
these processes is more complex and difficult.
Applications have been made in clastic deposits
down to depths of 2,000 m, with porosity of over 20%
and permeability of more than 200 millidarcy. Oil
saturations, the original oil density having been
between 10 and 40°API, varied between 30 and 94%.
The process is based on injecting into the layer air, or a
mixture of fuel gas and air, so as to trigger combustion
and to control it more easily. If the temperature of the
field so permits (it has to be higher than at least
55-60°C), spontaneous combustion can take place a
few days after injecting the air. If the conditions for
spontaneous combustion are not present, artificial
combustion can be achieved by means of appropriate
devices, such as gas burners or electric heaters, or by
using catalytic systems. Combustion is triggered
around the injection well and its front is propagated
into the field and is kept going through air injection.
In the combustion zone, the temperature can reach up
to 650°C, at which value cracking of the heavier
components of the oil and the production of coke can
occur. The viscosity of the oil is reduced by various
orders of magnitude when there is a shift, under
pressure from the products of combustion, towards the
producer wells. For better control of the combustion, it
is possible to inject air together with a moderate
quantity of water (wet combustion) which, in the
oilfield, is transformed into superheated steam which,
in its turn, after going past the combustion front,
mixes with the nitrogen in the air, while the gas (flue
gas), represented by carbon oxide and dioxide,
displaces the oil and the condensates. A number of
laboratory and field tests confirm that wet combustion
is able to improve the areal efficiency of displacement
and to reduce the project lifetime, thus implicitly
diminishing the operating costs.
As stated, the process, because of its complexity,
has not yet been applied except in a few pilot cases,
which moreover have brought to light operational
difficulties linked with its control (for example, the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

plugging of producer wells by the deposition
of carbonaceous residues and waxes as a result of the
oil cracking process, the failure of the tubing and of
the lines due to the high temperatures reached
in the producer wells, and the possible explosion
of the compressors). Operational difficulties also
included the formation of undesirable products, such
as emulsions which reduce the productivity of the
wells, or the production of water with a low pH, rich in
ions, iron and sulphates, which lead to corrosion and
environmental problems.
As the combustion process takes place in the upper
part of the formation, the ideal candidates are fields of
moderate thickness and saturated with oils
characterized by a medium-to-low API gravity.
Gas injection processes
Interest in EOR processes based on gas injection,
in particular natural gas and carbon dioxide, has also
increased in the last few years following the
introduction of restrictions on emissions aimed at
reducing environmental impact. These restrictions are
applied by the main hydrocarbons producer countries,
which demand the reinjection of gas into the
associated reservoirs, if the gas is not of any
commercial value, or the injection of CO2 for the
reduction of gaseous emissions (GHG, Green House
Gas) responsible for the greenhouse effect.
Experiments have been carried out using various
gases, among them, apart from the already mentioned
natural gas and CO2, also nitrogen and LPG
(Liquefied Petroleum Gas).
The gas that is injected into the reservoir should be
miscible with oil so that the process of displacement in
the pores of the rock will be really effective. Achieving
miscibility involves in fact a drastic diminution in
interfacial tension, from approximately 2-3 N/m2 to
values close to zero, and hence the oil-gas capillary
pressure tends towards zero. Upon contact between the
gas and the oil, a cushion of miscibility is generated in
the reservoir, which favours the displacement of the oil
and reduces the mobility of the gas which, having a
viscosity some orders of magnitude lower, would tend
to precede the oil to the producer wells, leading to a
premature escape and a consequent low recovery. If
these conditions cannot be achieved, and thus the oil
displacement process is not practicable due to
problems of miscibility, then prior to injecting the gas
into the reservoir, a limited volume of LPG (LPG
miscibile slug), which is miscible with the oil, could
be injected, or else water, as an alternative for strictly
economic reasons. In this last case, the water, being
immiscible with oil by its nature, serves the function
of controlling the mobility of the gas, as well as
contributing towards the mechanical displacement of
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
the oil from the pores, because it has a comparable
mobility. To achieve this mobility control and to
reduce the volumes of gas necessary for field
applications, water is also injected in alternation with
gas in miscible processes (WAG, Water-Alternating-
Gas process).
Gas injection can be applied in both clastic and
carbonaceous non-fractured reservoirs, at depths of
more than 1,000 m and with a greater than 20-30%
saturation in oil. There are no constraints linked with
temperature; indeed the higher it is, the greater the
probability of the miscibility of the gas with the oil.
The recommended density and viscosity values of the
oil are higher than 22°API and 1.5 mPa⭈s respectively.
Chemical processes
The EOR processes that use chemical products
require more complex management than do thermal
processes, regarding both choice of products and
assessment of the real performance of field
applications. Excluding certain initiatives in progress
in China (Daquing and Shengli fields; Chang et al.,
2005), applications are few in number or are at the
pilot plant level.
The chemical products in use can simply increase
the viscosity of the water used for displacing the oil so
that the mobility (i.e. the relation between the
permeability of the water with polymer and the
viscosity of the solution) of the water decreases and
the displacement front is more homogeneous. For this
function (polymer flooding), suitable polymers are
used, of high molecular weight (around one million),
and they may be of either natural or synthetic origin.
Because they have to withstand the reservoir
conditions (for example, high temperatures,
mineralogy that favors the adsorption of the polymer
on the surface of the rock grains, and high salinity
values of the formation water), the polymers can be
synthesized to function in very specific ways, and this
is always costly. To reduce the high costs, the polymer
concentration in the water is not kept constant
throughout the injection phase; rather, the
concentration diminishes with distance from the oil,
from its maximum value at the contact front with the
oil, down to zero.
Other applications of EOR processes with
chemical products involve the use of surfactants
dispersed in water (surfactant flooding), which reduce
the water-oil interfacial tension to values near 10⫺5 to
10⫺4 N/m2, so as to bring the value of the capillary
pressure down to zero and help the water force the oil
out of the rock pores.
The stability characteristics that surfactants must
possess are similar to those of the polymers; and
similarly, they may be prepared on an ad hoc basis to
211
NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
match the characteristics of the reservoir. To reduce
costs, processes have been tested in the field which
combine the two actions: that of the surfactant solution
driven into the formation and that of the polymer
(micellar/polymer flooding), yielding even greater
benefits than from the application of the two separate
processes. While on the one hand at laboratory scale
the results have been excellent and promising, on the
other hand the results of applications in the field have
been rather disappointing, probably because of the
difficulties of characterizing the formation concerned
(type and extent of the non-uniform features of the
rock texture, in the mineralogy and in the size of the
pores; distribution of the water and the oil; hydraulic
communication between the injection wells and the
producer wells, etc.). The combination of injection of
an aqueous surfactant solution and of a gas can
generate foam, the purpose of which is to improve the
areal efficiency of the oil displacement.
To reduce even further the costs of a process based
on the injection of surfactants, the possibility of
directly generating surfactant in the reservoir has been
tested by injecting alkaline aqueous solutions (sodium
hydrate, sodium orthosilicate, sodium carbonate,
ammonia, etc.) that have a high pH value. Once in
contact with the oil, these cause the saponification of
the acid component and the consequent formation of
surfactants (alkaline flooding). For these processes,
too, there has been study of the combination of an
injection of alkaline solution driven into the reservoir
by water thickened with polymer. Although the
principles put to use in this process are fairly
interesting, its effectiveness is more difficult to
determine because of the previously mentioned
non-uniform features present in all reservoirs. This is
especially true if these reservoirs are in an advanced
state of exploitation and therefore have an oil
distribution impossible to assess with present methods.
The fields that can benefit from the application of
chemical processes should be located at a depth of less
than 5,000 m and at temperatures that should not
exceed 90°C. The oil should have a density of more
than 15°API for polymer flooding or 20°API for the
other processes, and so the viscosity of the oil should
be less than 150 mPa⭈s for polymer flooding and
35 mPa⭈s for the other processes.
Other processes
As already stated, this definition refers to a series
of technologies still in the experimental phase or
applied to resolve particular production problems.
Fig. 1 makes reference to the mechanical recovery of
hydrocarbons, i.e. to the exploitation of bituminous
sands in shallow fields, as happens, for example, in
certain extensive Canadian deposits. The deposits are
212
situated at the surface and are worked by mechanical
excavation. The main treatment consists of the thermal
or catalytic cracking of the bitumens, from which is
obtained syncrude, a light oil whose commercial value
is far higher than that of the original product.
Other technologies are based on the application to
the production well of vibrations produced by specific
instruments (whirling orbital vibrators), which generate
elastic waves at a low frequency (5-500 Hz) for the
purpose of increasing production. Their principles of
operation are not yet fully known; some claim there is a
decrease in the surface tension between the oil and the
surface of the porous matrix, while others say there is a
disaggregation of the liquid films that cover the rock
grains and the coalescence of the oil dispersions. High
frequencies, generated by ultrasonic devices lowered
into the producer well, are instead used for removing
solid deposits that can hinder production.
To retard the premature arrival of the water
coming, for example, from a drive aquifer,
technologies have been developed that are applied
around the producer well (water shut-off). An aqueous
solution of a polymer and a chemical product (for
example, a trivalent chromium salt), that acts as a
bridge between the polymer chains (cross-linking
agent), is injected into the formation that produces the
water. The well is closed for a certain period of time
(shut-in period) in order to permit the generation of a
gel whose consistency is such that it clogs the larger
pores through which the water was conveyed. The well
is then reopened for production. The placement of the
gel around the producer well, its consistency and its
duration in time are the unknown factors that
determine the effectiveness of this technology.
Lastly, among the processes that cannot be
included in the three traditional groups, is Microbial
Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR). Although this
process has been studied ever since 1926, in reality it
has only recently had some significant application in
the field. It is based on the injection into the reservoir
of either extracellular bioproducts derived from the
metabolism of certain micro-organisms, or of bacterial
stock or spores which develop when provided with
appropriate nutrients. Thousands of different species
of micro-organisms have been identified whose
metabolism can produce polymers (polysaccharides
and proteins), surfactants (lipopolyanions), alcohols,
etc., that are useful for the oil recovery process; but
also substances such as methane, nitrogen, carbon
dioxide and H2S, which can entail operational
problems not foreseen in the design phase.
The main benefits attributable to the MEOR
process involve the use of bioproducts to improve the
microscopic and areal efficiency of oil displacement.
By using these bioproducts, the zones of highest
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

permeability are plugged, forcing the water to invade
other zones not previously involved. If used in
reservoirs of heavy oils, the micro-organisms are
potentially able to transform the hydrocarbons having
a high molecular weight (for example, asphaltenes)
into hydrocarbons made up of simpler molecules,
which are more easily producible.
As this is a complex and little-known mechanism,
even with regard to studies conducted in the
laboratory, this process is unlikely to have generalized
applications in the field because of the temperature,
which must not exceed 80°C, and because of the
salinity of the formation water.
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
References
Chang H.L. et al. (2005) Advanced in polymer flooding and
alkaline/surfactant/polymer processes as developed and
applied in the People’s Republic of China, «Journal of
Petroleum Technology», February, 84-89.
Donaldson E.C. et al. (edited by) (1985) Enhanced oil
recovery, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2v.
Green D.W., Willhite G.P. (1998) Enhanced oil recovery,
Richardson (TX), SPE.
Emilio Causin
EniTecnologie
San Donato Milanese, Milano, Italy
213
 3.2.2 Recovery factor optimization
Introduction
In this section we consider possible
developments in the technology of Enhanced Oil
Recovery (EOR). The discussion includes some
aspects of the more general topic of recovery
optimization, which apply to any stage of field
development. The focus, however, is on EOR, which
is sometimes also called tertiary or improved
recovery. The resource base to which these recovery
methods can be applied is increasing. In contrast, the
resource base for primary recovery (not yet
discovered fields, and discovered but currently
uneconomic fields) will at some point, perhaps in
the not-too-distant future, begin to shrink.
Forecasting the future of any technology is a
risky venture. Jack Kilby (recipient of the Nobel
prize in physics, 2000) said that he knew at the time
he invented the integrated circuit that the
technology would be important, but that even he did
not foresee how widespread the impact would
eventually be. Failure to foretell the effects of a new
technology is a common problem. It can be
attributed in part to the difficulty of envisioning
developments in other, perhaps unrelated, market
sectors or technologies. When a few key advances
in independent areas are brought together for the
first time, a new capability or market can emerge
that could not have been imagined even by someone
working in one of those areas.
Such synergies are likely to affect the oil
industry because its central role in fueling the world
economy draws attention from many disciplines.
Indeed, the industry still exists largely because it
has a long history of technical advances.
Technology has enabled operators to continue to
meet rising demand for oil by finding, developing,
producing and transporting oil from previously
unimaginable fields.
In many areas of technology, advances are
limited only by human creativity. What can be
imagined can be designed, prototyped, tested,
improved, and so on. Yesterday’s wild idea
eventually becomes an indispensable part of modern
life. This phenomenon of ‘boot-strapping’, whereby
214
a major, completely new industry emerges over a
few decades following a handful of key discoveries,
is now commonly regarded as the natural course of
technology. The archetypical examples are personal
computers and cellular telephones.
In the oil industry, the constraints imposed by the
physical characteristics of reservoirs are severe. The
simple reality that reservoirs are found in geologic
strata far below the surface of the earth affects every
aspect of producing oil. The challenges are well
known and have attracted the ingenuity and
perseverance of many talented people for decades.
In a reservoir, what can be imagined can be
frustratingly difficult to design, and even harder to
prototype, test, improve, and so on. Moreover, the
oil industry already exists and operates at a global
scale, and there is less opportunity for
boot-strapping new developments in technology
when they must compete against long established
methods having the same function – in this case,
getting oil from the reservoir to a market.
Charting the future of EOR requires a somewhat
different perspective from that used for other areas,
even though EOR is highly dependent on
technology. The goal of this chapter is to set out
some basic principles, both economic and technical,
that will influence the implementation and
development of EOR processes. These principles
will shape the future of EOR, but they can provide
only a rough guide to the details of future EOR
processes. Indeed, we will see that a shift in at least
one, possibly two EOR paradigms may be necessary
in order for this technology to play a significant role
in the industry in the future.
The discussion will build upon a fundamental
understanding of EOR objectives, and so we begin by
reviewing them briefly.
EOR is a process that recovers incremental oil
from a reservoir. In this context, incremental means
not recoverable by primary or secondary methods,
even after arbitrarily long periods of time.
Primary and secondary production can recover
only a fraction of the OOIP (Original Oil In Place) in a
reservoir. The reasons for this are purely physical and
therefore inevitable. The oil remaining in place after
primary and secondary production is the target for
EOR processes.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

Primary production is driven by an energy source
intrinsic to the reservoir. These sources include, for
example, compaction of the rock stratum containing
the oil, and influx of water from an aquifer connected
to the reservoir. Secondary production generally
means injecting water into some wells so as to push oil
out of the reservoir through other wells.
A field being operated under primary or
secondary recovery reaches its economic limit
when operating costs exceed the revenue generated
from oil production. The economic limit is reached
before the physical limit of production. That is, at
the economic limit, the operator could continue to
run the primary or secondary production method,
and the method would continue to extract oil from
the reservoir. The rate of production would be small
and would continue to decrease. But even if
secondary production were continued indefinitely, a
significant fraction of the OOIP would never be
recovered. The existence of a physical limit is
fundamental to EOR, even though the limit is never
reached in practice. The future of EOR is tied
closely to long-term oil demand, and new oil
(from newly discovered fields) and incremental oil
(from EOR applied to existing fields) are the only
ways to meet that demand.
In this context it is helpful briefly to distinguish
processes such as well stimulation from EOR. The
objective of a well stimulation treatment is to
increase the rate of production of oil from a well.
In general, increasing the flow rate does not lead to
higher ultimate recoveries during primary or
secondary production. Thus, stimulation may be
characterized as a process that allows one to recover
the same amount of oil in a shorter period of time.
The objective of EOR is to recover more oil than
would otherwise have been produced, i.e. the
incremental oil defined above. In the process of
recovering that oil, production rates may or may not
increase. The usual observation when EOR is
implemented is that field production rates decline
less rapidly than before. For economic reasons, it is
of course desirable that production rates increase
during an EOR project. This point is quite
important and is discussed later; here it suffices to
distinguish the technical objectives of stimulation
from those of EOR.
It is also helpful to distinguish EOR in
conventional reservoirs from EOR in heavy oil
reservoirs, tar sands, bitumen, and oil shale. The latter
group of resources either have very high oil viscosity
or contain kerogen rather than oil. Primary and
secondary recovery from these unconventional
resources is small. Reducing the in situ viscosity of
heavy oil is the classical approach to this problem.
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
Injecting heat into the reservoir, via steam or hot
water, is the usual mechanism for reducing viscosity.
Heat is also necessary for converting kerogen to oil.
These thermal processes meet the definition of EOR
given above. Once the oil is mobilized, these reservoirs
are subject to the same technical difficulties as
conventional reservoirs. However, the differences
between EOR in conventional and in unconventional
reservoirs are great enough that competition will arise
between the two applications. The competition will be
extensive, affecting funding for research and
development, capital for field projects, the pricing of
the recovered oil, etc.
Drivers for EOR
The factors shaping the future of EOR can be
grouped into technical, economic and environmental
categories.
Technical drivers
The technical driver for EOR is the physical
limit on primary or secondary recovery described in
the preceding section. This discussion focuses
on conventional reservoirs because the essential
difficulty in heavy oil reservoirs is viscosity.
The classical remedy for producing viscous oil is to
raise the temperature, and this introduces a different
set of priorities for assessing physical limits
on recovery.
In conventional reservoirs, there are two reasons
for the physical limit on the recoverable fraction of
original oil in place. First, the flow properties
(permeability) of every oil reservoir vary widely
with the location in the reservoir. This means that
there is always a path of least resistance between an
injection well and a production well. Water injected
during secondary recovery inevitably finds this path
and sweeps oil along the path. Subsequently injected
water will continue along this path, even after the
oil has been swept from it. The natural heterogeneity
of rock properties thus leads to the problem
of poor sweep efficiency: injected fluids do not move
uniformly throughout the reservoir volume.
The second reason is that oil droplets can be
trapped in the pores of reservoir rock. Pore sizes in
sedimentary rocks (the type of rock in which nearly all
reservoirs are found) are on the order of 10⫺6 m.
When an interface between two immiscible fluids such
as oil and brine exists in such a small space, a
significant pressure difference arises between the
fluids. This pressure difference, known as the capillary
pressure, leads to spontaneous disconnection of the oil
phase when water imbibes into the pore space of a
reservoir. The capillary forces on the disconnected
215
NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES

droplets of oil are so large compared to gravity forces the other key factor influencing the future of EOR:
and viscous forces that the droplets cannot be economics. In a global industry that is producing a
displaced from the rock. This is the origin of the commodity essential to global economic activity, one
problem of poor displacement efficiency: some cannot make reliable extrapolations about technology
fraction of the oil initially present is left behind the without considering the influence of economic forces
displacing fluid. over longer time periods.
For simplicity, the preceding discussion assumed
the surface of the reservoir rock was water wet. If the Economic drivers within the oil industry
rock is oil wet or of mixed wettability, the details Within the oil industry, the economic driver for
change, but the macroscopic consequence persists. A EOR is the certainty of knowing where oil can be
fraction of the oil will be trapped in pores on the time found – namely, the reservoirs depleted under
scales of practical interest. primary or secondary production. In comparison,
The technical drivers for EOR are universal. All finding oil by drilling exploration wells is more
reservoirs are candidates for EOR, because primary risky. This factor simultaneously sets the economic
and secondary recovery processes have rather poor threshold for EOR. If the finding and lifting costs
sweep efficiency and displacement efficiency. per barrel of primary or secondary production oil
Typically one half to two thirds of the OOIP remains are less than the costs of producing an incremental
in the reservoir at the end of secondary recovery. In barrel via EOR, then EOR projects will not play a
this regard, the future of EOR is guaranteed. There will significant role in the industry. EOR experienced
be no shortage of candidate reservoirs in which some one sustained growth period in the last several
type of EOR could be implemented. decades beginning after the jump in oil prices in
All processes that have been proposed or 1974 and strengthening after the jump in 1980
implemented for EOR address the physical (Fig. 1). The interest and activity in EOR then
mechanisms underlying poor sweep efficiency or dwindled as oil prices settled and as new primary
displacement efficiency. Future processes must also production increased.
address these mechanisms. Whether they adopt similar Most current operators have prospered or at
approaches will be the focus of our subsequent least survived without resorting to EOR. They have
discussion. avoided EOR because most EOR processes are
relatively costly. The price of oil has not stayed
Economic drivers high enough for a sufficiently long time for EOR
The technical factors described in the previous projects to be economically attractive. The increase
section are well known in the oil industry. Indeed, in oil price in 1973 led to nearly twice as many
efforts to develop EOR processes date back at least to EOR projects active at the end of the 1970s. After
the 1950s. Field deployment of different processes has the increase in oil price in 1979-80, the number of
waxed and waned with the price of oil. This leads to EOR projects more than doubled by the

Fig. 1. Variations in EOR 600 90

projects as a function
EOR projects in USA 80
of the price of oil.
500 oil price
price in constant dollars (2004)

70
number of active projects

400 60

50
300
40

200 30

20
100
10

0 0
1970
1971
1973
1975
1976
1977
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004

year

216 ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS


mid-1980s. The collapse in prices in 1986
immediately reversed the trend, with one third as
many projects operating by the end of the 1990s.
Because the timescale for recovering oil in an EOR
project is long, or at least longer than the time
between peaks and valleys in oil price during the last
twenty to thirty years, it can be difficult to sustain an
EOR project long enough to fully evaluate its
potential. (The application of steam flooding to
heavy oil reservoirs is exceptional in that it has been
less vulnerable to swings in oil price).
The same prices that make EOR attractive also
make it attractive to increase exploration activity
and to develop previous discoveries that were not
economically viable at lower prices. This is of
crucial importance. This development makes it
even more difficult for EOR projects to survive.
(This argument is a variation of the position that
market forces will always act to prevent the arrival
of a peak in global oil production.) The economic
advantage of EOR lies in the known remaining oil
in place, but this advantage only appears valuable
when primary production is decreasing and new
discoveries are not being made. As long as
technical advances, such as 3D seismic and
ultra-deepwater exploration and production
technologies, continue to arrive, industry will
continue to be able to meet increases in demand
with primary and secondary recovery. This has
been the case for several decades. Moreover, the
concept of a ‘swing producer’, a country that can
adjust its production rapidly to make up shortfalls
or absorb gluts of the order of several million
barrels a day, now appears to be taken for granted,
as Saudi Arabia has played that role for nearly
thirty years. These experiences lead many
forecasters looking five, ten, and even twenty-five
years ahead to predict that the trend of increasing
production will continue. From this perspective,
the greatest successes of EOR will always be about
ten years in the future.
Oil production from marginal wells is often a
problematic issue for industry and for government in
mature oil provinces. These wells produce oil at
small rates, typically less than ten barrels per day,
accompanied by fifty or one hundred times as much
water. In aggregate, production from marginal wells
is a non-negligible contribution to overall supply.
Revenue from individual fields is small, and
operating costs such as electricity to run pumps
make the economics of these fields marginal,
especially when oil prices are low. Shutting down a
marginal field by plugging and abandoning its wells
is the only alternative when the field is no longer
economically viable.
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
The disposition of marginal wells has a
significant impact on the future of EOR. Although
the oil production rates are small, the reservoir still
contains large amounts of oil, all of which is in
principle a target for EOR processes. The cost of
implementing EOR in an existing, operating field is
much less than in an abandoned field. Resuming
operations in an abandoned field requires drilling
new wells. Because the field’s primary energy has
already been depleted, a large number of wells will
be needed. The capital investment required to
re-establish flow from (and into) the abandoned field
for an EOR project thus becomes prohibitively large.
Keeping marginal fields in operation preserves a
resource base for the eventual application of EOR,
while abandoning them essentially precludes the oil
remaining in place from ever being extracted.
Maintaining marginal operations keeps an
additional option open for long-term energy supply
planners. Until that option is exercised, however,
industry, government and society must decide how
to pay for those marginal operations. If oil prices
remain high for extended periods of time, then the
decision is likely to be easy, as operators will be able
to make a reasonable profit, assuming that the costs
of equipment, workovers, and other operations
remain roughly constant. The difficulty arises when
oil prices are flat and the profit margin becomes
unsupportably small for the operator. Then a
government that wishes to keep the fields operating
for long-term strategic motives faces the dilemma of
whether to intervene in the market. The merits of
such intervention are typically hotly debated,
particularly when the intervention affects something
so central to economic growth and the environment
as energy supply. The debate over marginal fields is
even more complicated because the time when
society may benefit from the marginal fields is
impossible to predict, and the technology needed to
exploit those fields cost-effectively is not obviously
available. If the balance of opinion shifts toward
short-term expediency or a non-intervention policy,
then the future of EOR will be constrained by a
smaller set of candidate reservoirs than would
otherwise be available. Whenever the time finally
comes to consider the broad application of EOR,
only the fields still operating will be candidates.
The rate of production required to qualify a
marginal field as economically viable may be
larger if the operating costs are also larger, as is the
case in offshore or remote locations. Thus an
argument similar to the above can apply to fields
now producing at relatively large rates, if they have
large operating costs, and may apply increasingly
often in the future.
217
NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES

Economic drivers from outside the oil industry 40,000

From the perspective of the global economy, the 35,000
economic driver for EOR is clear. Economic growth is

GDP (dollars per capita)

inextricably tied to energy consumption. For most of 30,000
the Twentieth century, fossil fuels were the main 25,000
source of energy. In the last few decades, the balance
20,000
between fossil fuels has shifted to oil and gas from
coal. Moreover, total energy consumption has grown 15,000
inexorably for more than thirty years despite price
10,000 10 largest populations
shocks and economic downturns. With a few relatively
10 richest countries
brief exceptions, oil consumption has also grown 5,000
steadily for many decades (Fig. 2). 0
There is nothing to indicate that the trend of 0 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.08
increasing demand for oil will change significantly in oil consumption (bbl/d) per capita
the next several decades. One compelling reason is the
correlation between national prosperity (as measured Fig. 3. Correlation between GDP per capita
by per capita GDP, Gross Domestic Product) and per and the consumption of oil (bbl/d) per capita.
capita oil consumption (Fig. 3). Presently, the countries
with the largest populations are also relatively poor, as led to a reduction of 50% in demand for oil (an
indicated by the points in the lower left corner of Fig. unprecedented reduction; the biggest drop in world
3. Some three billion people live in the six countries demand in the last forty years was 8% during the early
having per capita GDP less than 5,000 dollars. Several 1980s).The world would still be consuming over 40
of these countries are well on the way to developing million barrels a day (given that global demand
their economies, however, and in today’s world exceeded 80 million barrels per day in 2004).
development entails hydrocarbon consumption. Thus, Supplying that much oil remains a prodigious
even if energy efficient technologies are rapidly enterprise, and eventually production from
transferred to these nations, an increase in global oil conventional sources (primary and secondary recovery)
demand will accompany the development of these will decline for a sustained period of time. Thus from
countries. A harbinger of this trend is that China is the perspective of demand growth, the question about
now imports more oil than any other country except the future of EOR remains ‘when’ rather than ‘if’.
the United States, yet per capita consumption in China During 2004-2005, the price of oil increased
is fifteen times smaller than in the United States. dramatically. In constant dollars, the increase up to the
The trend for increasing petroleum demand may be time of this writing is comparable to the increases in
weakened by several factors in the coming decades. 1974 and 1980, i.e. an increase by a factor of two to
Even so, the sheer scale of the global economy will be three in money of the day. Will this price escalation
more than sufficient to sustain interest in EOR. lead to an increase in EOR projects, as it did in the
Suppose for example that a series of dramatic changes past? On the one hand, industry veterans who
remember the rise and fall of EOR in the 1980s are
90,000
cautious about embarking on that course again. Some
global oil consumption (1,000 bbl/d)

companies are currently reviewing the state of the art

80,000
in EOR, but it is too early to tell whether those surveys
70,000 will lead to the sanction of new projects. Companies
60,000 hold different portfolios of operating assets and thus
50,000 may have very different assessments of the potential
value of EOR.
40,000
On the other hand, the fact that the rate of global
30,000
oil consumption is one third larger in 2005 than it was
20,000 at the time of the last price escalation in 1980 means
10,000 that continuing to meet demand will be that much
0 harder. If this pressure is reflected in a sustained high
price for oil, then EOR will certainly receive much
1965
1968
1971
1974
1977
1980
1983
1986
1989
1992
1995
1998
2001
2004

more interest.
year Over the longer term, the possibility of a gap
opening between demand and supply from
Fig. 2. Changes in global oil consumption. conventional production is the single biggest

218 ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

 ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY

influence on the future of EOR. As long as no
serious gap emerges, there is little market-driven or
short-term incentive for implementing EOR, and the
investment decisions will probably be based on
expectations of oil prices. Organizations that expect
oil prices to remain high for long enough time will
consider EOR seriously.
If a gap does emerge, it is likely that EOR will
be a priority of government and industry, along with
unconventional resources, gas-to-liquids conversion,
etc. This ties the future of EOR to the much
discussed question of peak oil, the moment in
history that – in retrospect – will prove to have been
the time when global oil production reached its
maximum rate. Unfortunately, efforts to forecast the
timing of global peak oil production have never
yielded a consensus. It is instructive, however, to
note the current situation in the major producing
regions. Nineteen countries produced at least one
million barrels a day in 2004, together accounting
for five sixths of all production (Fig. 4). Four of
these countries – the United States, United
Kingdom, Norway and Indonesia – are now on a
trend of declining production rates. The trend is well
established in the USA and Indonesia, while the UK
and Norway peaked only in the last few years.
Except for some variations due to political
instability or war, each of the other fifteen countries
shows either steady or increasing production rates
over the last few years. Eventually each of these
fifteen will join the ranks of countries with
declining production. But current trends suggest that
in the near term, a gap between supply and demand
is not likely to be a driver for EOR.
For political reasons, some nations from time to
time declare a preference for domestic production to
meet their energy needs. This preference supports
EOR; in fact, EOR is the only way for several
nations to increase domestic production, or at least
slow down the rate of at which their production is
declining. Because there is a higher cost for EOR, it
is difficult to sustain this preference for very long.
Environmental drivers
Environmental considerations can also influence
the future of EOR, but their effect is likely to be
secondary to the technical and economic influences
discussed above. The relevant environmental issues
can be categorized as conservation, biosphere
disruption, and greenhouse gas mitigation.
Conservation
Energy conservation has two connotations, and
each has a different effect on oil demand. Some
use conservation to mean never using a commodity.
This obviously reduces demand for the
commodity. Historically, this type of conservation
has not affected oil demand significantly. Once an

Fig. 4. Illustration 70,000

of recent oil production Brazil
Kazakhstan
in countries producing China
at least one million bbl/d. 60,000 Nigeria
Libya
Algeria
United Arab Emirates
50,000
Saudi Arabia
production (1,000 bbl/d)

40,000 Kuwait
Iraq
Iran

30,000
Russian Federation

Venezuela
20,000
Mexico
Canada
Indonesia
10,000 Norway
United Kingdom

USA
0
1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

year

VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY 219

NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
industrial economy has been built on oil, most
consumers and businesses continue to use oil. The
amount used may vary in response to price, but
deciding not to use oil at all is rare enough not to
warrant further analysis in this context.
The other connotation of conservation is
achieving the same level of economic activity with
less energy. By this measure, technologically
advanced countries have been engaged in
conservation for at least thirty years, for their
energy efficiency has increased steadily over that
period. The motivation for these gains is economic
rather than environmental, but the macroscopic
effect is the same: this type of conservation slows
the rate at which oil demand increases. If these
efficiency improvements had not been achieved
and implemented in industry, business, and
consumer uses, the current level of global economic
activity would demand a substantially larger rate
of oil production than the 80 million bbl/d used
in 2004. Overall demand has increased steadily in
the last couple of decades primarily because
overall economic activity has outpaced the gains
in efficiency.
In this context it is instructive to consider the
deliberations of the USA National Academy of
Sciences during a 1974 forum on energy future
alternatives and risks (NAS, 1974). In the aftermath
of the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, the discussions
focused upon whether consumers would adjust their
lifestyles to fit available energy supplies, and how
soon energy alternatives such as nuclear, solar, and
oil shale would meet the gap between oil supply and
the demand expected in the year 2000. Many, but by
no means all, speakers anticipated major changes in
the way the USA and the world obtained and used
energy. In a similar vein, the Five year outlook for
science and technology prepared by the National
Research Council (USA) in 1975 and again in 1980
(but published in 1982) noted the importance of
conservation, energy efficiency, and development of
synthetic fuels.
As has often been the case in energy studies,
the future turned out to resemble the past much
more closely than expected; the similarities are
perhaps even less surprising when expectations are
formed in the aftermath of rapid increases in oil
price. Oil, natural gas and coal dominate the
energy supply in 2005 just as they did thirty years
ago, and transportation demand is still being met
almost entirely by petroleum. The only substantive
change has been an increase in the share of nuclear
energy. Significant investments were made in oil
shale in the USA, but large scale development of
that resource never materialized. Production of
220
renewable energy increased, and some sectors such
as wind generated energy have increased rapidly in
the recent past. These sources nevertheless amount
to a small fraction of the total energy supply.
Meanwhile, oil demand in absolute terms has
doubled during the past forty years. It seems likely
that expanding economic activity will continue to
outpace efficiency gains as well as adjustments to
consumers’ lifestyles that affect energy use.
Demand for transportation fuel seems to be
price-inelastic when viewed over longer periods of
time. Voluntary conservation measures did occur in
the 1970s, but the general slowing of the global
economy during that period was the primary
influence on oil demand. As the price of oil
dropped, growth in oil consumption resumed.
Conservation per se is thus unlikely to affect the
future of EOR.
Biosphere disruption
The effect of oil exploration and production
activities on the biosphere – surface water,
groundwater, wildlife habitats, local ecosystems –
has long been a matter of contention. The
contention sometimes leads a society to restrict or
forbid exploration and production in certain
geographic areas. Whether these restrictions are
good or bad is not the issue here. Rather, the key
point is that the restrictions are rarely accompanied
by a decree which reduces oil demand. Thus, the
part of demand that putatively would have been
met by production from the restricted area must
come from somewhere else. In principle, this
increases the attractiveness of EOR, because it can
be applied in already developed fields. In practice,
a policy link between forbidding development in
one area and promoting EOR in a mature area has
not been tried. There has been nothing to prevent
industry from carrying out EOR in existing fields.
One may therefore conclude that EOR would have
been implemented had it provided a suitable return
on investment, or a return comparable to that
anticipated from exploration in the forbidden area.
Imposing EOR by fiat to make up for foregone
exploration opportunities would therefore be met
with resistance from many stakeholders.
Greenhouse gas mitigation
Oil is produced for a range of applications, in
which transportation dominates. Most of each
barrel produced is burned in internal combustion
engines, boilers, and jet engines. The energy
content of coal and natural gas is likewise
harnessed by burning. The result is the emission of
large quantities of CO2 to the atmosphere, more
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

than 20 billion tons in 2001. Mitigating the effect
of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is now an
important political issue. It may soon become an
economic issue, if carbon taxes are imposed and
international carbon trading schemes emerge.
A broad portfolio of strategies for reducing
CO2 emissions has been proposed. Some
strategies, such as replacing gasoline and diesel
with low- or zero-carbon fuels, will reduce oil
demand. Others, such as the capture and storage of
CO2 from coal- and gas-fired power plants, would
not directly affect oil demand. They would however
allow demand to increase without incurring a net
increase in emissions, and thus they would
indirectly make EOR more attractive. The energy
required for current capture technologies is
substantial. A large coal-fired generation plant
would need additional energy input of around 30%
of the plant output to separate CO2 from the flue
gas. The implementation of capture and storage
schemes would therefore increase overall energy
consumption. The accompanying price pressures
could conceivably shift the balance between
primary energy sources, but the effect on EOR
would not be large.
A more direct effect of carbon management
upon EOR is that one of the first mitigation
strategies that is likely to be adopted is storage in
oil reservoirs. Using mature fields to store CO2
while simultaneously recovering incremental oil is
a natural marriage of a long-standing EOR method
(miscible and immiscible CO2 flooding) with
subsurface sequestration. Along with using CO2
for enhanced coal bed methane recovery and for
pressure maintenance in natural gas reservoirs, this
strategy is one of the few that produce revenue
while reducing CO2 emissions to the atmosphere.
Selling the incremental oil or methane will offset,
and conceivably could even pay for, the cost of
CO2 capture, transport, and injection. This is
particularly true in geographic areas containing
numerous fixed sources of CO2 (power plants,
refineries) and mature reservoirs, such as the Texas
Gulf Coast and parts of the Middle East. In those
areas, the existing infrastructure could be
harnessed relatively cheaply with small increments
of pipeline capacity and compression facilities.
Operating an EOR project that is
simultaneously a CO2 storage project will require
re-evaluation of the traditional approach to EOR.
Large amounts of CO2 are recycled in a typical
EOR flood. In contrast, a storage scheme in a
reservoir would presumably stop injecting when
CO2 reaches production wells. Because the CO2 is
purchased, operators track CO2 usage closely. Yet it
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
is usually difficult to reconcile the mass of CO2
injected with the mass of CO2 produced and the
mass of CO2 held in the reservoir (in the void
space formerly occupied by oil and dissolved into
reservoir oil and brine). Accounting for the actual
amount of CO2 stored in order to receive
greenhouse gas emission credits may therefore be
problematic. If these credits are a significant part
of the project economics, then this impetus for
EOR will be reduced.
Nevertheless, the advent of carbon taxes,
carbon trading, cap and trade policies, and the like
will transform a niche industry into a worldwide
commodity business. The volume of material being
handled would approach that of the oil and gas
business. This might spawn a revolution in
miscible flooding for EOR. Historically, projects
have depended heavily upon the proximity of
natural sources of CO2 because the costs of
pipeline construction and CO2 transport are key
factors in the decision to proceed with this type of
miscible flooding.
The net effect of greenhouse gas mitigation
policies on the future of EOR will change with
time, in correspondence with the balance between
the different strategies described above. In the near
and medium terms, the push to reduce CO2
emissions will increase the attractiveness of EOR.
In the long term, EOR will be less attractive
because the upward pressure on oil demand will
decrease.
Historically, environmental considerations have
had a second order effect on oil demand, and thus
on the attractiveness of EOR. In global terms,
economic activity has the first order effect on
demand. As discussed in the previous section, this
state of affairs is likely to continue for the
foreseeable future. Oil demand will continue to
increase, and thus EOR will eventually become
attractive. However, the wider implementation of
EOR will depend on whether other advances
enable other resources to meet demand. Such
advances might include new discoveries of
conventional oil, new methods to develop currently
marginal conventional reservoirs, and
cost-effective methods to produce crude from
heavy oil, oil shale, tar sands, etc. (see below).
Oil industry technology developments
for EOR
Overview
EOR is not a new process. The physical basis
for small sweep efficiency and small displacement
efficiency is well known and has been studied for
221
NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
decades. Mechanisms for addressing these low
efficiencies are also known. For example,
increasing the viscosity of the water injected into a
reservoir improves sweep efficiency; this is the
basis of polymer flooding. Reducing the interfacial
tension between the injected water and residual oil
in the reservoir increases displacement efficiency;
this is the basis of surfactant flooding. Injecting a
fluid that is miscible with the oil also increases
displacement efficiency; miscible flooding
techniques include the injection of CO2 at high
pressures. The viscosity of crude oil usually
decreases as temperature increases, so that
production rates increase proportionately; this is
the basis for steam flooding in reservoirs of very
viscous oil.
Other EOR methods are variations on or
combinations of the above. Air, nitrogen, flue gas,
and lean gas (recycled light hydrocarbons
produced from the reservoir) have been injected.
CO2 injection is usually alternated with water
injection. There is a history of efforts to place
microbes into reservoirs, where they could
generate recovery-enhancing chemicals when
appropriate nutrients are injected. Recently the
feeding of indigenous microbes within a reservoir
was reported to improve the sweep efficiency of a
waterflood, as the multiplying microbes filled
pores and reduced the permeability of rock
contacted by water. Micellar-polymer and
alkaline-surfactant-polymer floods, sometimes
augmented by microbes, have been applied in the
field. The in-situ generation of foam can improve
sweep efficiency.
All these methods are known. Most have been
at least pilot tested in the field; several have been
applied to full fields for long times. All have some
advantages and disadvantages, and certainly
improvements in all of them are possible, as no
method yet recovers all the remaining oil in place.
Some methods are mature technologies. Others,
such as foam and surfactant flooding, have
matured considerably in the last decade outside the
oil industry, having been applied to the remediation
of soils and aquifers contaminated with NAPL
(Non Aqueous Phase Liquid). For example, it is
possible to tailor a surfactant molecule to a
particular oil and reservoir, and to manufacture that
molecule for a competitive price.
The key lesson from this brief overview is that
the EOR in the future may look very similar to
EOR in the past.
This rather mundane conclusion does not
reflect researchers’ lack of ingenuity or interest in
the problem. Rather, it is another manifestation of
222
the economic drivers outlined above. Technologies
for EOR have not been widely deployed (except for
steam flooding) because they are costly, not
because they fail to recover incremental oil. Only if
oil prices remain high for an extended period of
time does widespread EOR implementation make
sense. But it has proved difficult to sustain for long
periods of time a high price for a commodity
supplied in such extremely large quantities. Indeed,
price movements more often reflect perceptions of
gluts and shortages than actual differences in
supply and demand. This makes it quite difficult to
implement existing EOR methods, and practically
impossible to introduce new methods. Moreover,
any new method of EOR necessarily addresses the
physical mechanisms that govern sweep efficiency
and displacement efficiency, which are exactly the
same mechanisms addressed (with varying
success) by existing methods. A new method also
has to compete with established methods into
which decades of research, development, and
application have been invested. Thus a revolution
in EOR technology, or at least a period of dramatic
innovation, does not seem likely.
The periodic upswings in oil price that tend to
generate discussion of EOR implementation also
tend to generate more primary and secondary
production, thereby reducing the need for enhanced
recovery from existing fields. One measure of this
principle is that a little over three hundred EOR
projects are reported in a worldwide survey
(Moritis, 2004). The number of such projects
peaked at just over five hundred during the mid
1980s. This is a small fraction of the total number
of fields in the world. For reference, oil was
produced during the last decade from thousands of
fields in Texas alone. Worldwide, there is a very
large number of candidate fields for EOR, but very
few of them have actually implemented an EOR
process. Moreover, of the currently active EOR
projects, 40% are steam floods. All the steam
floods are applied to reservoirs containing oil
whose viscosity is too large for any other method
to work. Thus the fraction of conventional oil
reservoirs in which EOR is being applied is even
smaller.
The primacy of production rates
Why do so few EOR projects get implemented,
when so many candidate reservoirs exist? The scale
of global oil demand has one other implication that
needs to be considered: production rates matter a
great deal. Indeed, for future EOR projects the
production rates will be more important than the
extent of incremental recovery.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

The capital investments required to compete in
an 80 million bbl/d global business are very large.
An attractive return on large investments requires
large production rates very early in the project
life, even when oil prices are high. Here EOR is at
a distinct disadvantage compared with primary
production. The target oil for incremental recovery
is either located in hard-to-reach places (the sweep
efficiency problem) or distributed as myriad
droplets in pore space (the displacement
efficiency problem). Using EOR to move this
target oil into a coherent bank that will flow into
production wells at large rates has proven difficult.
EOR usually has the advantage of existing
infrastructure, built for primary or secondary
recovery processes or both, and so is not as capital
intensive. But the typical candidate reservoir has
operating costs approaching revenues from
production, so the need for increased production
rates remains.
Declaring that large production rates are the
central challenge for any EOR method, current or
future, constitutes a shift in paradigm. Rate is not
explicitly mentioned in the traditional statement of
the challenge for EOR. The technical objective of
EOR has always been to recover residual oil and
bypassed oil. The measure of technical success is
the fraction of remaining oil in place that is
recovered. In the future, however, when the gap
begins to widen between oil demand and oil
production from conventional reservoirs, the
overriding measure of performance for a project
will be the rate of oil production.
The definition of ‘large production rates’
depends on the magnitude of global oil demand
and on the rates achievable from other fields; thus
it can change with time, as the number and type of
fields in production changes. Historically, the
standard has been set by new discoveries operating
under primary production. As the difficulty and
cost of finding and developing new fields has
increased, so has the economic pressure to obtain
large production rates from those fields.
The difficulty in obtaining large production
rates is highlighted by recent statistics. The EOR
projects active in 2004 produce altogether around
2 million bbl/d, which is between 2-3% of global
production. In mature areas such as e.g. the United
States, EOR projects are contributing a larger
fraction of total production, currently about 10%.
One quarter of the global EOR production is from
just three projects, all of which are steamfloods.
One third of all EOR comes from these three
steamfloods and two miscible floods using
hydrocarbon injection. This implies that most of
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
the EOR projects produce at much smaller rates.
The mean of the field production rates reported in
2004 for polymer floods is 1,300 bbl/d, 2,800 bbl/d
for CO2 miscible floods, and 7,600 bbl/d for
hydrocarbons miscible. The median production
rates are even smaller: 600 bbl/d for polymer, 930
bbl/d for CO2, and 1,000 bbl/d for hydrocarbons
miscible.
For conventional oil reservoirs, the most
common EOR method in 2004 was miscible
flooding, followed by polymer floods. 40% of the
EOR projects involved injection of miscible gases,
mostly CO2 or light hydrocarbons. Together these
produced about 600,000 bbl/d during 2004. More
than half this production was from just eight of the
137 miscible flooding projects.
The situation in EOR, in which a very small
fraction of the fields produces the majority of the
oil, mirrors the situation in primary and secondary
recovery. For several decades, a small number of
very large fields has contributed the majority of oil
produced worldwide. In 2000, 68 million barrels
were produced. Simmons (2002) estimated that
nearly half of this production came from 116 fields;
20% came from just fourteen fields. The last field to
produce 1 million bbl/d was found in the 1970s.
These observations are usually the background for
discussion of the peaking of oil production, but they
reinforce the question of which fields should receive
higher priority for EOR.
The imbalance in the distribution of
production rates among EOR projects raises an
interesting choice for the future development of
EOR technologies. Should research focus on the
few very large fields, where success or failure of
any individual project would have major
implications? Or should research focus on the
many smaller fields, where a certain fraction of
the projects could be technical failures without
jeopardizing overall production? In very large
fields it is not unusual for operators to apply
several EOR techniques one after another,
sometimes even simultaneously in different parts
of the reservoir. This suggests that current EOR
methods are not particularly effective in these
fields and that there is scope for improving EOR
performance in large reservoirs. Of course, this
perception of a general problem may be due to
problems specific to each of the reservoirs in
question, in which case there is some chance that
the optimal technology for one reservoir would
not be transferable to another field.
In fact, EOR by means of CO2 injection has
been practiced in the giant fields of west Texas
since the 1970s. The SACROC (Scurry Area
223
NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
Capital Reef Operations Committee) unit was
flooded with CO2 alternating with water with
varying degrees of success, and recently a new
operator has announced its intention to re-establish
an extensive CO2 flood there. The Yates field has a
similar history: several EOR techniques having
been applied, none of which yielded long-term
production rates comparable to those obtained
during primary recovery. In general, miscible
floods with CO2 achieve oil production rates one
third of that obtained earlier in the field life.
This is not to say that these projects were
unsuccessful, technically or economically. A
common occurrence is that the rate of decline in
production decreased as a result of the project. This
can pay out the cost of the project. But the overall
rate of production typically continued to decline,
even in these giant fields. In terms of meeting the
anticipated increases in demand in the future, these
examples are not encouraging.
It can be argued that the problem lies in the
lack of long-term commitment to EOR in these
(and other) fields because more attractive returns
are available from new fields. Except for a brief
period in the mid 1970s, global oil production has
risen steadily for many decades. For an individual
field, production rates typically ramp up to a
plateau that extends for some period of time,
followed by a steady decline. Given this behaviour
of individual fields, overall production can
continue to increase only if new discoveries are
brought onstream faster than the existing fields
decline. In such an environment, most operators
will have a choice: they can invest in exploration
and develop new fields, or they can invest in
recovery methods that will slow down the rate at
which production declines from mature fields. It is
not surprising that most choose the former option.
There is another possibility that must be
considered. Implementing an EOR project in the
field is a technical challenge that requires careful
design; a solid understanding of the geology,
petrophysics, geochemistry and reservoir
engineering characteristics of the field; and
experience with the EOR method being applied.
The time required for the first two items in this list
is usually longer than the time available for
business and investment decisions. This is
especially likely if the anticipated production rates
from the project are not large, as is frequently the
case with EOR. The ownership of many mature
fields has changed several times, making it hard to
accumulate or to preserve a sufficiently deep
technical understanding of the asset. The last
requirement in this list, EOR experience, is now in
224
short supply after nearly two decades of attrition in
the industry. Indeed, difficulty in finding enough
people with appropriate expertise, or the time
required to develop a new generation of experts,
may prove to be the single greatest barrier to
implementing EOR in the medium term.
A large number of fields producing at small
rates does add up to a significant contribution to
overall production. Such an aggregation may also
allow another response to emerge to the
requirement for large production rates. In some
oil-producing regions such as the USA, the vast
majority of wells produce at very small rates. Over
the last fifty years, the USA has had around half a
million oil wells operating at any given time. The
average production rate per well has varied over a
remarkably narrow range, between 10 and 20
barrels per day. The arithmetic mean hides an
underlying bimodal distribution: a handful of wells
producing at large rates, and several hundred
thousand wells producing just a few barrels a day.
For an operator working entirely in an
environment dominated by the low-rate wells, an
EOR process that could sustain an increase to, say,
10 bbl/d per well for a period of years would be
quite attractive. A process that yielded 50 bbl/d
might seem miraculous. But such rates in fact
would be achievable by any EOR method which
developed a true oil bank. This is because many
low-rate wells are also producing about 100 bbl/d
of water, water that is being injected elsewhere in
the field. In other words, the fluid throughput in
the reservoir is large, even though the oil
production rate is small. Establishing an oil bank
ahead of water being injected at these rates would
therefore result in oil production rates of tens of
barrels a day.
Whether such rates are achievable warrants
further discussion and perhaps a change in
paradigm. This is discussed in more detail in
subsequent sections. Here we remark upon the
other consequence of operating in a low-rate
environment: the need to contain operating costs.
Producers are now long accustomed to having little
capital for field development when well rates are
so small. New EOR technology that might deliver
an oil bank thus faces a dilemma. Without a track
record, it will be impossible to get operators in
low-rate fields to invest their scarce capital.
Operators with a wider portfolio of fields may
have more capital available, but don’t need the
technology in their high-rate fields, and in any case
would prefer to invest it in other prospects.
Focusing on small fields has some advantages.
One is that industry would be able to rebuild a
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

broader base of expertise in EOR methods.
Another is that modifications to existing methods,
or new methods, could be tested more rapidly and
with smaller economic risks. On the other hand,
suppose that a method was implemented in a small
field that recovered 20% of the remaining oil in
place over a ten year period, doubling the field
production rates during much of that decade. This
would be an obvious technical success and a likely
economic success. But if the field produced only
1,000 bbl/d at the beginning of the project, the
increased rate would not have much effect on
global supply. To achieve the rates needed to make
a difference, the challenge would be to deploy
thousands or tens of thousands of EOR projects
more or less simultaneously. Whether the capital
necessary for a venture of this magnitude could be
obtained may become the critical question.
Nevertheless, getting a modest increment of 500
bbl/d from each of 10,000 fields would offset
substantial declines in production from large
fields. Is this achievable with existing EOR
technologies? The answer lies in the role of
reservoir heterogeneity (see below).
If oil rates are critical, then EOR will not be
taken seriously until a few years after the infamous
peak in global oil production arrives. At that point,
all operators will have a narrower spectrum of
investment options: which existing fields to
attempt to maintain production from, and which
abandoned fields to attempt to resuscitate. Even
this scenario assumes that operators are only
concerned with conventional oil. If other primary
sources such as heavy oil, tar sand, and oil shale
can be developed fast enough to keep up with
demand, then in effect the peak in global oil
production will have been deferred yet again.
Bringing on new production, even from more
difficult and expensive unconventional sources,
will be more attractive than investing in assets
from which production will continue to decrease.
Extensions of existing EOR methods
The limitations of existing EOR methods have
been described in some detail in the literature. The
descriptions indicate several areas in which
incremental advances in the technology would be
beneficial. For example, chemicals that withstand
higher temperatures and salinities would extend the
applicability of polymer and surfactant floods and
enable mobility control in miscible floods in deep
reservoirs. However, this document will omit a
catalogue of the other areas for likely development
in favour of a surprising but far-reaching
observation: a large number of reservoirs, perhaps
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
as many as half of them, are not good candidates
for any of the existing methods. The potential
impact of incremental advances should therefore
not be underestimated.
This observation is based on the sets of
screening criteria that have been developed for
most methods. Reliable screening will be essential
if EOR is to contribute cost-effectively to overall
production, and there is sufficient experience with
most methods for reasonably good criteria to have
been developed. Now, a common measure of the
potential benefit of EOR is the amount of target
oil. The usual calculation of the target volume
applies typical sweep and displacement
efficiencies to the original oil in place in all
existing reservoirs, without applying any
screening. If many of these reservoirs are not in
fact amenable to EOR, this points to a research
priority: what methods might be developed to work
in these reservoirs?
This point is implicit in the National Petroleum
Council (United States) report on EOR carried out
in 1984. The working group estimated that nearly
15 billion barrels of oil could be recovered by
implementing then-available technology, and that
almost twice that amount would be recoverable if
advanced technology were developed and applied.
The estimates included a careful accounting for
economic factors, not just the technical issues. The
total resource base on which the analysis was
applied amounted to more than 300 billion barrels,
of which about 200 billion would have been in
place when the EOR methods were applied. Thus
the estimates of oil economically recoverable by
EOR represented a small fraction of the remaining
oil in place, around 10%. Assuming typical
recovery efficiencies for the EOR methods, this
suggests that less than half, perhaps less than one
third, of the reservoirs passed the screening
criteria. It follows that more casual estimates of
EOR potential, derived from accumulating the oil
remaining in place in reservoirs worldwide and
multiplying by a reasonable average recovery
factor, will be more optimistic. More importantly,
these estimates highlight the need for EOR
technologies that are applicable to more types of
reservoirs. It is important to note that the criteria
for applicability are not just technical (e.g.
maximum reservoir temperature, formation brine
salinity, oil viscosity) but also economic.
While screening criteria are useful, it is
axiomatic among EOR workers that any method
must be carefully tailored to an individual
reservoir. In other words, there are no ready-made
remedies or methods. The properties of the oil, the
225
NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
production history, the type of secondary recovery
process (if any), the presence or absence of aquifer
support and gas caps, the heterogeneity of the
reservoir, the chemistry of the formation water, the
mineralogy of the formation, the pattern of wells,
the temperature and pressure of the reservoir, all
can influence the design of an EOR process.
Implementing EOR requires expertise in classical
reservoir engineering as well as in the principles of
enhanced recovery. It also requires time: time for
laboratory studies to support the design work, time
for characterizing the reservoir and its history, time
for designing and pilot testing the process. Since
each reservoir project requires the dedication of
expert staff, a large scale effort in EOR will require
a major investment in human resources by the
industry. Even if relatively simple and low cost
methods can be established, such as improving
sweep efficiency by adding nutrients for reservoir-
indigenous microbes to the injection water in a
water flood, applying those methods to a large
number of fields will still represent a significant
investment. This presents once again a competition
within the industry for capital and resource
allocation between EOR and new sources of
primary production. The future of EOR in the near
to medium term will depend upon this competition
as much as upon the merits of individual EOR
processes.
The combination of technologies is the most
likely new approach for EOR in the future. For
example, the advent of permanent sensors that
provide real-time, downhole data makes it
conceivable to operate an EOR process in the same
way that large scale engineering facilities are
operated on the Earth’s surface. Injection rates and
volumes and concentrations of injected chemicals
could be varied in response to observed rates and
pressures in wells so as to optimize oil recovery.
The missing link here is a predictive model of the
reservoir. The control loop requires us to predict
rather accurately the response of the production
wells to variations in the injection well conditions.
It remains to be seen whether the reservoir can be
characterized well enough to enable this prediction.
These capabilities are emerging for application
to primary and secondary recovery projects, and
are adaptable to EOR. On the other hand,
time-lapse seismic monitoring offers the prospect
of tracking injected and displaced fluids and is
particularly suited for gas injection because of the
density contrast with brine and oil. It could help
optimize the operation of an EOR project, if the
cost of data acquisition can be reduced. Another
advance in the seismic monitoring of EOR would
226
be higher spatial resolution. The ability to track
sweep efficiency would undoubtedly lead to better
understanding of the strengths and limitations of
existing EOR processes.
Incorporating advances in drilling technology
could dramatically alter the future of EOR, either
by making it unnecessary or by making it much
more efficient. Drilling advances will not be driven
by EOR considerations, but practitioners alert to
the implications of these advances for sweep
efficiency could usher in a new era.
The most fundamental difficulty with oil
reservoirs is that they are located hundreds or
thousands of metres below the earth’s surface. The
means for getting the oil to the surface has not
changed since the inception of the industry:
drilling a well from surface to reservoir. The
methods of drilling have of course changed
dramatically during the last century, but the ratio of
wellbore diameter (a few tens of centimetres) to
reservoir extent (a few kilometres) has not. Even
with the advent of horizontal and multilateral
wells, even in fields with densely spaced wells,
nearly all the oil in the reservoir must travel
through tens or hundreds of metres of rock to reach
a wellbore.
A much larger gradient in potential is necessary
to move oil through rock than to move it through a
well. More critically for EOR, rock properties can
vary over length scales as small as a few
centimetres. Fluids travelling tens of metres will
therefore encounter a significant range of
heterogeneity. Consequently injected fluids will
find preferential flow paths, and the greater the
travel distance between injector and producer, the
larger the volume of rock that is not on these paths.
Being able to place wells closer together reduces
this volume and increases the sweep efficiency of
the displacement.
An alternate statement is that closer spacing
allows the operator to impose a larger local
pressure gradient in regions that would have had
small fluid velocities (and therefore be poorly
swept) at larger spacing. Because most EOR
processes involve injection, the improved sweep
efficiency offered by closer spacing would also
increase the effectiveness of these processes. The
cost of drilling wells is therefore quite important to
the future of EOR, though as discussed below,
drilling costs also affect exploration and
development of fields during primary recovery.
Geometrically, wellbores are essentially
one-dimensional objects within a
three-dimensional reservoir. Mathematically,
wellbores can be approximated as line sinks and
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

sources. One way to avoid the limitations described
in the preceding paragraph is to increase the
dimensionality of the well. This is the premise of
hydraulic fracturing: by establishing a
two-dimensional aperture within the formation, the
flow field sees a plane of small potential near the
well, rather than a line of small potential. This
increases productivity of the well because more oil
travels through less rock to reach the wellbore. To a
small extent, the shorter travel path may also
increase the sweep efficiency of a displacement
process, but this is offset by the greater probability
that encroaching or injected water will reach the
fracture sooner.
These considerations lead to the question of
whether new ways of establishing hydraulic
communication with reservoirs that would improve
sweep efficiency can be developed. If so, the effect
on EOR is likely to be negative. This is because
operators could obtain greater recovery during
primary and secondary recovery from existing and
new fields. This would reduce the need to recover
oil from already depleted reservoirs. In a field that
has already been swept using conventional
line-source and line-sink wells, it will be more
difficult to realize retroactively the benefits of
wells that are not line sinks.
Oil and gas regulators place limits on the
density of conventional wells in a field. Even
without this constraint, the large cost of drilling
wells has driven operators to develop fields with as
few wells as possible. Thus the potential technical
benefit (increased sweep efficiency) of a large well
density has not been tested in practice. The concept
of microhole drilling has been advocated to reduce
the cost of drilling conventional wells. The idea is
to extend the notion of drilling from coiled tubing
units until boreholes two inches in diameter can be
constructed. The goal of current development is
that the microholes would cost half as much as
conventional well construction. Should this
technology be successfully deployed, it could open
the path to the low cost construction of drainholes:
many small diameter holes extending long
distances into the reservoir from a single
conventional well. This idea is not new, but it
cannot be implemented to the extent needed to
increase sweep efficiency appreciably until the cost
drops substantially. Even with recent advances in
downhole motors, geosteering, etc., well
construction is still very dependent upon large
capital investment.
The evolution of long-reach horizontal and
multilateral drilling gives some indication of the
time required for practical and economically
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
feasible technology to be developed. Only in the
last decade or two have horizontal wells become
widely utilized. They still cost several times as
much as a vertical well. The driver for horizontal
and multilateral well construction has always been
the increase in production rates, which can be an
order of magnitude greater than a vertical well. The
larger productivity justifies the greater investment.
This consideration will be one of the difficulties
for the drainhole concept. While a dense array of
drainholes emanating from a well will reduce the
average distance traveled by oil and thereby
improve sweep efficiency, the incremental increase
in productivity will become progressively smaller
as the number of drainholes increases. Near-term
production rates dictate the economics of field
development, not long term recovery factors. Thus
it will be difficult to justify this type of well
construction unless the incremental cost and time
required to construct a drainhole is very small.
Improving sweep efficiency without drilling
The preferential flow paths that cause poor
sweep efficiency are the inevitable consequence of
having a relatively small number of line sources
and sinks (wells) in a three-dimensional rock
stratum that has heterogeneous permeability.
Unless and until drilling costs drop by at least an
order of magnitude, traditional approaches to
improving sweep efficiency will probably continue
to be applied in the future.
The basic idea of these approaches has been to
amend the injected fluid so that the preferential
flow paths become less attractive. This has usually
meant reducing the mobility of fluid in the
preferential paths, for example by injecting a
polymer solution or foam rather than brine. This
improves the ratio of the mobility of the displacing
fluid to the mobility of the displaced fluid, thus
reducing the instability of the interface between the
fluids and hence the tendency to form preferential
flow paths. Promoting the growth of indigenous
microbes by adding appropriate nutrients to the
injected brine has the same objective but employs a
different mechanism: reducing the mobility of fluid
in the preferential flow paths that have already been
swept. Nutrient preferentially arrives in those paths,
and the growth stimulated by the nutrients
decreases the permeability of the rock. Recently
developed, advanced polymers that change their
morphology in response to changes in temperature
or brine composition also reduce mobility in the
water-swept rock.
The common characteristic of these methods
for improving sweep efficiency is that, when
227
NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
applied, they increase overall resistance to flow
through the reservoir. It follows that it will be even
more difficult to obtain large production rates from
this class of EOR methods. This is inevitable since
the methods force displacement to occur within
non-preferential flow paths. In contrast, a method
that pulls the oil into the preferential flow paths,
rather than pushes it through the regions of smaller
permeability where the oil originally resides,
should be able to produce at much larger rates. No
such method is known, but the situation is
analogous to naturally fractured reservoirs. For
those reservoirs, the idea of spontaneous
imbibition of brine into the matrix blocks is
attractive, because direct displacement of oil by
flow through the matrix blocks is not required. The
disadvantage is that the rate at which oil is
displaced from the matrix into the fracture is slow,
because it is governed by gradients in capillary
forces. Methods to speed up this displacement
would be of great benefit to EOR.
Mechanisms in EOR processing
It is commonly observed, in miscible and
in surfactant floods that the injected
recovery-enhancing chemical arrives at producing
wells simultaneously or even ahead of the oil.
Increased oil production does occur, but the oil is
commingled with the injected components. This
behaviour is not what simple theory predicts, and
the discrepancy may reveal a fundamental insight
into the future of EOR.
A common conceptual picture of the processes
that increase displacement efficiency, such as
miscible flooding and surfactant flooding, derives
from fractional flow theory. The theory assumes
one-dimensional flow and shows that the coupling
between phase saturations and phase relative
permeabilities gives rise to a set of fronts (changes
in saturation or composition or both) that
propagate through the reservoir. The front with the
largest velocity is the oil bank, a region of mobile
oil at saturations appreciably above the residual
saturation. The bank is formed from oil mobilized
by the injected solvent or surfactant. Fractional
flow effects cause the velocity of this mobilized
oil phase to be larger than the velocity of the other
phases and components, so that solvent or
surfactant travel more slowly.
Why then do solvent and surfactant not arrive
later in the field? A likely explanation is
heterogeneity, though the instability known as
viscous fingering also contributes. By definition,
one-dimensional flow cannot account for either of
these phenomena. Yet the guaranteed existence of
228
preferential flow paths in any reservoir would
naturally result in rapid arrival of injected
components along those paths. If those paths
occupy a relatively small fraction of the reservoir
volume, the amount of oil mobilized along the
path will also be small. This suggests that much of
the oil produced by these EOR methods in the
field is not being displaced by the solvent or
surfactant. Instead it is being dragged along with
the injected fluid. More precisely, oil or
components of the oil phase are transferring from
volumes of bypassed or residual oil into the stream
of solvent or surfactant solution flowing past. This
mechanism has been used very effectively in
environmental applications. After a high viscosity
fuel oil had contaminated a fractured rock with
small matrix porosity, a specially designed
surfactant solution was injected through the
fracture network. The surfactant solubilized the
heavy oil, creating a low-viscosity emulsion. A
very large recovery efficiency was accomplished
even though the process never induced the oil
phase itself to flow.
The implications of this assertion are profound.
Foremost is that the rate of production will be
limited by mass transfer, not by the rate at which
fluid is injected. If oil is being extracted into the
flowing fluid, banks of large oil saturation cannot
form and move ahead of the injected fluid. Rates of
production and incremental recovery estimated
from one-dimensional experiments and theories
will be optimistic. This makes maintaining sweep
efficiency at least as important to technical success
as the factors influencing phase behaviour, which
traditionally receive more attention in miscible and
surfactant flooding. This is not to suggest that
those methods do not employ mobility control. On
the contrary, it was recognized very early that
surfactant injection without polymer is futile; and
the problems with gravity override and
unfavourable solvent-to-oil mobility ratio are now
well known in miscible flooding, and have led to a
variety of process improvements. The point here is
that reservoir heterogeneity is the single greatest
obstacle that is common to many EOR methods.
Injected fluids find the path of least resistance to a
production well and in so doing never contact the
greater part of the oil remaining in the reservoir.
Because achieving the desired phase behaviour
between crude oil and solvent or surfactant
generally assumes good mixing between the fluids,
these methods are doomed to be much less
efficient if preferential flow occurs.
This line of reasoning leads to another proposition:
since preferential flow seems inevitable with current
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

technology, the design basis for miscible and
surfactant floods should be revised. Instead of the
traditional approach of tailoring compositions to
achieve optimal phase behaviour while flowing
through the rock containing oil, the composition
should be designed with the assumption that the slug
will flow past the oil-containing rock. It may be that
the optimal compositions for the latter type of
extractive recovery mechanism would be quite
different from compositions optimal for a
displacement-based mechanism.
Agents for mobility control are necessary for
miscible floods and surfactant floods, and these
methods achieve 10% to 15% recovery of
remaining oil in place. But much larger recoveries
would likely be attainable if better sweep could be
imposed. Indeed, one of the reasons that thermal
recovery of heavy oil is generally more successful
than other methods, typically recovering more than
50% of the oil in place, is that to a great extent it
relies on the conduction of heat into the formation
and the oil, not on advective transfer. Conduction
is almost completely insensitive to variations in
permeability, and thus the injected thermal energy
is not channeled into preferential paths.
Despite being widely recognized, poor sweep
efficiency is the oil recovery problem on which the
least progress has been made. The main methods
that address it are polymer flooding and
water-alternating-gas injection in miscible
flooding. Polymer flooding remains one of the
least successful methods in terms of average rate of
production per project, 1,300 bbl/d in the most
recent survey (Moritis, 2004), and in terms of the
fraction of remaining oil in place recovered,
typically 5%. These methods actually address the
issue of viscous fingering, the instability inherent
when a fluid of greater mobility (CO2, water) is
injected into a formation containing a fluid of
smaller mobility (oil). The instability evolves local
paths (fingers) of preferential flow. But fingering is
only part of the cause of poor sweep efficiency.
The existence of paths that connect a series of
regions of (locally) larger permeability between an
injector and producer is inherent in any
heterogeneous reservoir, and these preferential
flow paths will dominate the behaviour whether
viscous fingering occurs or not.
Methods that address the problem of
preferential flow paths have not been widely
implemented. Once the preferential paths have
formed, one strategy is to inject a slug of fluid that
enters these paths, just as previously injected fluid
has. The chemical composition of this slug is
chosen so that the slug reacts once it has filled the
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
preferential flow paths. The reaction either reduces
the permeability of the rock within that path, for
example by precipitating a solid onto rock grain
surfaces, or increases the viscosity of the carrier
fluid, for example by crosslinking a polymer. Both
changes have the same result: the path occupied by
the slug is no longer one of least resistance.
Subsequently injected fluids – which can be water,
solvent, or chemicals, depending on the recovery
process – will tend to flow around the affected rock
volume. New preferential flow paths will of course
arise, but these will pass through rock that
previously had seen little or no injected fluid. Oil
in these paths will be displaced, and the process
could then be repeated, in principle displacing
nearly all the oil in place, but at production rates
much larger than are typical of mature waterfloods
and many EOR processes.
The technical challenges for this strategy are
numerous. Foremost is designing a chemical trigger.
The ideal slug must propagate with little resistance
to flow so that it can fill most of the existing
preferential flow path. Failing to fill the existing
path compromises the beneficial effect, for the
unfilled part will certainly be found by subsequently
injected fluids. Water-like flow resistance is
important during placement. Otherwise injecting a
sufficient volume of slug will either require much
longer than operators are likely to wish to wait, or
will require injection above the parting pressure.
This resulting fracture would create a preferential
path that occupies little rock volume and thus is
likely to defeat the purpose of the treatment. The
active agents in the slug should propagate without
interacting chemically with the rock or the
formation fluids. Even a small degree of interaction
per unit volume would lead to large losses of agents
before the slug reached the far end of the
preferential path.
The chemical trigger would then be activated in a
coherent way, so that mobility decreases by a large
factor (say 10 or more) simultaneously throughout
the filled path. If mobility decreases in part of the
filled path sooner than in other parts, then
subsequently injected fluid will push the still-mobile
part of the slug around the region of low mobility
and into previously unswept regions of the reservoir.
When this diverted material eventually causes
mobility to decrease, oil in those regions will be
shielded from subsequently injected fluids.
Once the mobility reduction has occurred, it should
be long-lasting. The subsurface is a hostile
environment. Degradation of materials such as
polymers is a serious problem, especially in deep, hot
reservoirs. Finding a material or a method that
229
NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
satisfies these severe performance requirements would
have a tremendous impact on the future of EOR.
An alternative view of sweep efficiency
Because the achievable production rates from a
project, whether EOR or primary recovery, will
become ever more important in the industry, it is
important to realize that the paradigm implicit in all
current technologies addressing sweep efficiency
has a fundamental flaw. In every case, the goal of
these technologies is to reduce mobility in some part
of the reservoir. This means that, to the extent the
process succeeds in achieving this technical goal,
the rates of throughput – fluid moving to producers
from injectors – will decrease. This is self-defeating
in economic terms, unless the improvement in sweep
efficiency leads to significant oil banks being
formed. Smaller flow rates containing larger
fractions of oil could easily lead to larger revenues,
since many EOR candidate fields produce at very
small oil cuts. But as noted above, such oil banks are
not commonly observed. Moreover, several
iterations of plugging preferential flow paths and
creating new ones is likely to be needed to recover
significant fractions of the remaining oil. Unless oil
is recovered as a bank or slug of large saturation
from each new preferential path – and perhaps even
if a bank does form – the achievable production
rates will decrease with each iteration. It follows that
a critical requirement for the future of EOR is the
development of methods to improve sweep
efficiency that also reliably establish oil banks.
It would be possible to mitigate the decrease in
throughput caused by mobility-reducing EOR
methods by adjusting bottomhole pressures.
However, a slug that effectively blocked most of a
preferential flow path could easily reduce the well
injectivity by half. Doubling the difference between
injection and production wells would compensate,
but injection pressure is constrained by the parting
pressure of the formation. This remedy can only be
applied until that limit is reached, and it will
increase operating costs. Reducing the bottomhole
pressure in production wells will also help, but as
with injectors there is not much room for
adjustment. The costs of artificial lift would offset
the revenue from larger production rates.
Is a paradigm shift possible for methods that
increase sweep efficiency? For example, instead of
blocking the best paths in the reservoir in order to
force fluid through the next-best paths, why not
cause oil to be fed into the best paths? As noted
above, this may in fact be the way in which many
miscible and surfactant floods work in the field,
though they are not designed to work that way.
230
The key problem with extracting oil from the
unswept regions in this way is that production rates
are likely to be small. This is because the driving
force for oil movement is likely to be small. If the
oil is not being moved as a bulk phase out of the
unswept regions by viscous forces, then only
gradients in capillary pressure, chemical potential,
surface energies, or other diffusion-like
mechanisms are available. Such gradients may be
operating, for example, during waterfloods in
fractured carbonate reservoirs. Water
spontaneously imbibes into matrix blocks, causing
oil to drain into the fracture network and to be
produced. If these gradients can be made large
enough, for example by altering the salinity of
formation brine or wettability of the reservoir rock,
it is conceivable that production rates could
increase accordingly. In the case of sweep
efficiency, however, the overall production rate will
be proportional to the area of the mathematical
surface separating the volume of a preferential
flow path from the rest of the formation. This is
likely to be much smaller than the area for
imbibition in a fractured reservoir, and thus the
rates observed or inferred in those reservoirs may
not be achievable for extractive recovery from
unswept regions.
Preferential flow paths arise because of well
placement. Another way to change the sweep
efficiency paradigm therefore would be to create
new best paths by shutting in all existing wells and
drilling a new set of injectors and producers in
different locations. This is a radical idea in an
industry where the cost of well construction is
large. Indeed, as noted above, infill drilling, which
does not require abandoning existing wells, is a
widely practiced method for extending the life of a
reservoir, and probably would be practiced still
more if drilling costs were smaller. But if drilling
costs were to decline by, say, two orders of
magnitude, imposing a new well pattern on a field
could be the simplest way to obtain better sweep
efficiency with no decrease in production rates.
Heterogeneous permeability in a reservoir
handicaps any recovery method in which fluids are
pushed into the reservoir from one set of wells, while
fluids are withdrawn from others. This includes
waterflooding as well as all non-thermal EOR methods.
Technology developments outside
the oil industry and EOR
Overview
Developments external to the oil industry can
affect the future of EOR in two ways. One way is to
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

substitute for hydrocarbons in end-use applications.
The other is to enable new methods of producing oil.
We consider both possibilities in this section.
Around two thirds of each oil barrel is used for the
movement of goods and people. The substitution of
other fuels for gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, jet fuel, etc.
will of course decrease demand for oil, but because of
the sheer scale of the current hydrocarbon-fueled
economy, any substantial substitution will take a long
time. Moreover, substitution may be difficult or
impossible in some sectors (aviation, maritime,
long-distance trucking). These applications
require a few tens of millions of barrels of oil per
day and are expected to grow. It is conceivable
that this level of production could be sustained
over the course of a few decades without resorting
to EOR. For this to happen, production from
unconventional sources would have to increase
fairly rapidly during the transition to this lower
level of demand. The increase must make up the
difference between demand and supply from
conventional sources, and this difference is
expected to increase rapidly.
A substitute for gasoline would have the greatest
impact on oil demand, because nearly half of every
oil barrel goes to gasoline. Furthermore, fuel
substitution is feasible in automobiles, as shown by
experience with ethanol, biodiesel, liquefied
petroleum gas and compressed natural gas; and
with electric motors and gasoline/electric hybrids.
None of these alternatives presently account for a
large share of the market, however. One reason is
that gasoline internal combustion engines have set
the de facto standard for consumers’ expectations of
performance. A more pragmatic reason that also has
broader implications is that consumers are reluctant
to leave the existing infrastructure that supports
gasoline-powered automobiles. Gasoline is widely
available, thanks to decades of investment in
refineries, pipelines, and surface distribution
networks. Establishing a replacement will require
establishing a distribution system comparable to
that for gasoline. This is an extraordinary
requirement, given that more than ten million
barrels of gasoline are produced, distributed, and
consumed daily in the United States alone. The
infrastructure for electricity is large enough,
making electric cars and gasoline/electric hybrids
the external technologies most likely to affect
gasoline demand and hence EOR.
Development of alternative fuels may be
hastened by long periods of relatively expensive oil
and gasoline. Such periods are inevitable if EOR and
sources of unconventional oil cannot be developed
rapidly enough to fill any shortfall between demand
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
and production from conventional sources. Thus
transportation requirements are driving a feedback
loop that could settle into either of two quite
different states. In one, cars and light trucks run on
non-hydrocarbon fuels and oil demand is about half
of what it would otherwise be. In the other, EOR,
unconventional sources, and exploration for new
fields enable the consumption of acceptably priced
oil to continue to increase.
Arriving at either state requires prodigious
capital investments. If the evolution towards one
state or the other is left to market forces, then the
pace of technology development will be crucial. If
consumers can maintain their mobility in
non-hydrocarbon fueled vehicles at costs
comparable to historical levels for hydrocarbon
fuels, then the incentive for EOR declines. On the
other hand, if EOR plays a role in keeping the cost
of hydrocarbon fuels at levels acceptable to
consumers, then the incentive for large-scale
alternate fuels declines. In this respect, EOR has
the advantage of several decades of research and
development, plus the existing infrastructure for
hydrocarbon processing.
Whether the evolution will be left entirely to
market forces is another matter, of course. In that
discussion, policymakers’ perceptions regarding
the capability of EOR to deliver oil at significant
rates would be pivotal. The questions discussed
above regarding sweep efficiency and oil banks
will thus remain in the spotlight.
Microdevices and nanodevices
As discussed above, the physical cause of
residual oil is the predominance of capillary forces
at length scales of order 10⫺6 m, the size of typical
pore throats in reservoir rock. It is now possible to
construct Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems
(MEMS), devices whose parts are measured in
microns. Can such devices be useful for EOR?
One way to answer this question is to build a
device that mimics the behaviour of existing
devices, a common approach to introducing new
technologies. In the case of EOR, the existing
devices are usually chemicals. Polymers are a good
example. Increasing the viscosity of water by
adding polymer to it is a way to improve sweep
efficiency. Further improvement is possible if the
polymer solution is shear-thickening. If such a
solution is travelling rapidly through a rock, its
apparent viscosity increases. This behaviour will
counteract the tendency of polymer solution to
travel preferentially within already-swept regions.
One can imagine a device which mimics
shear-thickening behaviour. If the device senses
231
NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
that it is travelling rapidly, or is experiencing large
shear rates, then it would extend a
micro-mechanical arm. If the device senses that it
is travelling slowly, the arm would be retracted.
These actions would change the effective size of
the device, so that the apparent viscosity of the
water containing the devices would change.
This is a simple example of a smart fluid, the
properties of which change in response to its
immediate environment. The technical utility of
such fluids is not in doubt. The key question for
their future use in EOR is economic. The unit cost
of a manufactured device will have to be extremely
cheap, almost infinitesimal, in order to compete
with existing fluids. The number of polymer
molecules used in a polymer flood is astronomical.
A typical slug size is one tenth of the volume
occupied by oil in reservoir. For an average
reservoir, this volume might be of order 106 m3. If
the concentration of polymer in the slug is 0.01%
by weight – a dilute concentration – then the mass
of polymer required would be 102 t. Assuming a
polymer with average molecular weight of
105 g/gmol, this amounts to 1027 polymer molecules.
Polymer costs are on the order of $2 per kg, or
$10⫺22 per molecule, so acquiring the necessary
number of molecules for the polymer flood would
cost $200,000. Acquiring the same number of
MEMS devices for the same price will require
significant advances in self-assembly technology.
This comparison assumes a one-to-one
replacement of each polymer molecule by a
nanodevice. Suppose instead that a single device
were as effective as, say, one million polymer
molecules at changing the viscosity of the carrier
fluid. The smart fluid injection process would still
have to deploy 1021 devices at a cost of $10⫺16
each in order to be competitive. Clearly this
represents a significant barrier for small devices to
enter the EOR market.
It is worth noting the root cause of this
problem, namely the large scale of the oil industry,
producing tens of millions of barrels daily from
thousands of fields around the world. Any widely
material used in this industry must be available in
large quantities. This results in extraordinary
pressure to reduce the cost of that material or to
develop less expensive substitutes. The benchmark
that determines what is expensive is the price of
oil, the commodity being produced. The more
costly the material used in an EOR process, the
less of it one can use in that process. (This is why
polymer and surfactant floods for EOR use small
slugs of those active ingredients.) These
observations are not profound, but their
232
implications regarding the entry barrier for new
technologies are significant. The economies of
scale from which existing chemical devices benefit
are not yet available for nanodevices.
In contrast, MEMS and nanodevices can
certainly make feasible new or specialty
applications, notably in the medical field, for
which no alternatives exist. Such applications can
be pursued more readily since no benchmark
cost-to-capability ratio exists. Eventually one of
these applications may mature into a global
commodity industry, and at that point it will be
easier to determine whether small devices could
make a comparable difference in EOR. In the
meantime, it is difficult to envision any serious
application of this technology for EOR.
Given the economic disadvantage of building
devices that mimic behaviour of existing
chemicals, the obvious choice is to develop devices
capable of doing things that have not been possible
to date. Here again any new technology has a
disadvantage. The mechanisms responsible for
poor displacement efficiency and poor sweep
efficiency are well known and small in number.
Thus almost every possible combination of
mechanisms has been implemented in some
process at some time in the last fifty years, though
with widely varying success. A potentially fruitful
approach would therefore be to identify a
combination of mechanisms for which an efficient
process has not yet been implemented, and then to
develop a device that addresses that combination of
mechanisms. An example is in situ production of
recovery enhancing chemicals (polymers to
improve sweep efficiency, surfactants to improve
displacement efficiency, diluents to reduce oil
viscosity, etc.). A process that created these
expensive compounds within the reservoir should
have much smaller logistics and materials costs
than a process that procures these compounds from
surface factories and injects them into the
reservoir.
Microbes living within the reservoir offer a
tantalizing opportunity to implement EOR with in
situ production of the relevant chemicals. However,
despite half a century of research and development,
very few commercial successes of microbial EOR
have been reported. One reason is the relatively
small rate of reaction in microbial systems. A
microdevice that produced chemicals faster, with
more complete conversion of reactant to product
and greater specificity (fewer byproducts), would
have a significant advantage over its biological
counterpart. Such a device is at least conceivable,
given the advent of lab-on-a-chip devices. Making
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

them economic is a tremendous challenge, given
the small cost of microbes.
A counterargument to this rather pessimistic
outlook is the remarkable decline in the prices of
semiconductor devices during the last two or three
decades. The first commercial microprocessor
contained 2,300 transistors and cost about 1,000
dollars when it was introduced in 1971. Modern
devices may contain a hundred thousand times more
transistors yet cost ten times less. The
price-to-performance ratio for MEMS devices and
microfluidic reactors may follow a similar trajectory
over the next twenty years. If so, would not these
devices be poised to revolutionize EOR?
The answer will depend on how much
macroscopic effect can be obtained per device. For
example, an individual microbe may convert
nutrients into recovery-enhancing chemicals very
slowly, but 1 m3 of rock can easily contain a billion
microbes. Field scale trials of this type of microbial
EOR use bacteria in hundreds of cubic metres of
rock. If one device could produce 1,000 times as
much recovery enhancing chemical per unit time as
a single microbe, then hundreds of millions of
devices would be required to achieve the same
macroscopic effect as the microbes. To date,
microbial EOR has not been commercially
successful. Presumably an order of magnitude more
devices would be needed for effective recovery. At a
price of 0.01 dollars per device, the materials cost
for a field implementation would be of the order of
10 million dollars. At this cost, it is conceivable that
a field trial could be conducted. However, the
development time for a 10 mm device with this
price-to-performance ratio must be measured in
decades. Current trends in device development are
not focused on obtaining large fluid throughput rates
or on aggregating many devices to produce bulk
quantities of reaction product.
The size restriction to 10 mm is crucial if the
devices are to be deployed far enough into the
reservoir to establish an effective chemical
production region. The farther the region extends
from the wellbore, the longer the time that reactant
species in the injected water will spend in the
region. The longer the residence time, the smaller
the rate of reaction necessary to produce the desired
concentration of recovery enhancing chemicals in
the fluid leaving the reaction zone. Smaller reaction
rates are of course easier to achieve, especially for
the complex compounds to be produced and in the
small devices to be deployed. Thus there is strong
incentive to make the devices small enough to move
through typical pore throats in a formation, which
may be 10 mm or less.
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
In any practical application, these reaction
zones will be established around injection wells.
The large scale of oil field operations means that
large injection rates are needed in these wells. Thus
to gain an appreciable residence time, the reaction
zone needs to extend metres or tens of metres from
the wellbore. This places demanding performance
criteria on the devices. Propagation of particles,
whether microbes, fine silt, or other colloids,
through porous media is not a trivial exercise,
because a very wide range of behaviour is possible.
Particles can be strained by size exclusion when
they encounter a constriction smaller than their
diameter. They can be filtered onto the surfaces of
grains in the porous medium by a combination of
short-range forces. These processes have been
studied for over a century in diverse contexts,
including water purification, riverbank filtration,
and formation damage to reservoirs by fines
migration. Even so, the subject remains an active
area for research, especially when immiscible
fluids occupy the porous medium, which is the
condition relevant in all reservoirs. For example,
the movement of bacteria in porous media has been
widely studied, and observed behaviour ranges
from complete trapping as soon as the bacteria
enter the porous medium to transport across
interwell distances. Another avenue of research
seeks to explain the long-standing observation that
particles too small to be strained and too large to
be filtered nevertheless do become trapped in a
porous medium. As a result, most models of
colloid transport at field scales are essentially
empirical. The parameters in the models may be
related to mechanistic descriptions, but
ascertaining the values of these parameters
requires experimentation. Thus, obtaining a robust
model for the placement of microdevices in a
reservoir will be a research challenge in itself. So,
even if researchers complete the daunting task of
building a device that rapidly converts incoming,
simple chemical species to complicated
compounds useful in oil recovery, it cannot be
taken for granted that the device will work in a
field implementation of EOR.
Nanoparticles
The cost of micro- and nanodevices that would
be useful for EOR will be large, at least for the
first several generations of devices, because they
are engineered. In contrast, nanoparticles and
nanostructured assemblies (clusters of particles)
can be useful by virtue of their size, not necessarily
because of functionality built into the particle.
(Surfactant molecules form micelles in aqueous
233
NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
solution; and in this respect EOR has been using
nanostructured devices for decades.) Consequently,
these would be cheaper to produce and deploy, and
would be a more attractive first step towards
employing nanotechnology in EOR.
An example of the application of nanoparticles
for EOR would be chemical catalysis at the
oil/water interface within the reservoir. Submicron
particles could be propagated long distances within
the formation. The tendency of particles to
accumulate at fluid/fluid interfaces is well known.
If the particles contain appropriate metals, they
will have some intrinsic catalytic activity. The
presence of such particles at the oil/water interface
may promote the breaking of long chain molecules
into shorter chains, decreasing the viscosity of the
oil phase. This effect would be enhanced at higher
reservoir temperatures. If combined with addition
of heat to the reservoir, as in heavy oil and tar sand
applications, the effect might be substantial. With
suitable additives in the water, it may be possible to
convert some hydrocarbon molecules into
recovery-enhancing chemicals. If higher
temperatures are necessary to make these reactions
occur at economic rates, the greater thermal
conductivity of metal-bearing particles will
promote heat flux through the formation.
The principal challenge in this application is
determining whether any reactions that would be
useful for EOR are feasible. A secondary challenge
is achieving sufficiently rapid reaction rates.
Catalytic reactors generally immerse the reactive
particles, so that the resistance to mass transfer
between the bulk fluid and the reaction sites is as
small as possible. In the reservoir, the particles will
congregate at phase interfaces, increasing mass
transfer resistance. As with all EOR methods, the
particles must be easily separated from the
produced oil, or designed not to interfere with
refining operations. This is not a trivial
requirement given the scale of throughput at
refineries.
Engineered microbes
Biotechnology is a rapidly growing field. While
biotechnology applications to date have not
focused on petroleum recovery, the techniques of
genomic engineering and metabolic engineering
may be useful in EOR. The goal would be to
improve upon the current state of the art in MEOR
(Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery).
Currently, the most robust application of
MEOR is to promote the growth of indigenous
organisms by adding nutrients to a waterflood.
Injected water invariably establishes preferential
234
flow paths, reducing the sweep efficiency of the
recovery process. The added nutrients cause
biomass to grow in the preferential flow paths. The
increase in biomass occludes pore throats,
decreasing the permeability. Subsequently injected
water is diverted away from these paths and into
regions where little water has previously gone.
A less successful version of MEOR attempts to
use in situ microbes to convert nutrients in the
injected water and a carbon source into
biopolymers, biosurfactants, or other
recovery-enhancing molecules. One of the most
severe performance constraints on the microbes is
reaction kinetics. The microbes are placed in the
reservoir in the vicinity of the injection well.
Radial flow means that the injected nutrients (and
the carbon source, if injected) pass through the
region containing microbes in a short time. The
faster the microbes consume the nutrients, the
smaller the region that must be inoculated with
microbes.
Another constraint is specificity. If the
objective is to produce biosurfactant, then it would
be preferable to produce only biosurfactant.
Microbes tend to produce a wide range of
products, however.
Yet another constraint is robustness. Many
microbes that make a recovery enhancing chemical
are not well adapted to the higher temperatures or
salinities of reservoirs.
Genomic engineering could address these
constraints. Instead of culturing strains of naturally
occurring bacteria known to create useful products
and attempting to adapt them to reservoir
conditions, one could identify genes in any
microbe responsible for expressing a desired
product. Placing those genes in a thermophilic
bacterium could yield a strain with much better in
situ performance. As techniques for such
identification and manipulation continue to
develop, it could be possible to improve
substantially upon previous MEOR performance.
The potential tradeoff is that the engineered
bacteria would be released into the environment.
Though the release would be controlled, obtaining
approval might nevertheless be difficult. The
possibility that the engineered microbes would
reach the production well would lead to additional
permitting and approval hurdles.
Metabolic engineering offers a less drastic
approach to overcoming the constraints. The idea is
to identify the metabolic pathway – the loop of
sequential reactions – by which a microbe converts
an organic molecule into a desired product. By
examining this pathway and its relationship to
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS

other pathways in the organism, one may identify
compounds that could accelerate the desired
pathway, or inhibit other pathways that compete for
the same carbon source, or convert it to products
other than the desired compound. The microbe
itself is not altered genetically, perhaps alleviating
some of the regulatory issues associated with using
it in the subsurface.
It remains to be seen how much improvement in
performance under field conditions could be
obtained in these ways. Laboratory and field results
with non-engineered microbes suggest that
increasing the rate and specificity of the conversion
of the carbon source would be a desirable target, at
least as a first step. However, this may be beyond the
limit of metabolic engineering. The microbial
machinery may not be able to run that fast. It is not
obvious that genomic engineering would be an
efficient means of developing strains that convert
nutrients more rapidly, though it should be quite
effective at developing more versatile microbes.
Prognosis
The future of EOR in the next few decades will
resemble its past in that economics will dominate
technical issues. EOR has been studied and
implemented for several decades, but the number of
EOR projects has always been a very small fraction of
global activity. A sustained high oil price will make
EOR more attractive, but implementation of
non-thermal EOR is unlikely to be widespread until a
gap emerges between demand and the supply capacity
from conventional and heavy oil reservoirs. That gap
may arrive soon, though many previous predictions of
its arrival have been proven wrong. Until this event,
there is unlikely to be enough incentive within
industry or government to seek major innovations in
EOR. In this sense, the future of EOR will again
resemble its past, as incremental improvements to
tested methods gradually extend their applicability to
more fields.
A principal reason for the lack of widespread
implementation of EOR in the past is that the
methods did not yield large production rates. The
rates have usually been much smaller than previous
peak production rates from a field, and much
smaller than rates from primary production in new
fields. Hence investment in the industry tends to
go to projects other than EOR. If EOR is to make a
substantial contribution in the future – and such a
contribution may be a matter of great international
importance if a gap emerges between supply and
demand – then a shift in paradigm is needed.
Rather than focusing on the traditional objective of
VOLUME III / NEW DEVELOPMENTS: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, SUSTAINABILITY
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
recovering incremental oil, EOR should focus on
achieving large production rates. This is feasible in
principle, if oil banks can be formed; but in fact
most projects have only slowed the decline in
production rate from the field, rather than
increased the rate substantially.
EOR processes in conventional reservoirs usually
do not result in the arrival of oil banks at production
wells. The banks are expected on the basis of
laboratory behaviour and classical theory, and if they
do not materialize then small production rates are
inevitable. The heterogeneity of flow properties
common to all oil reservoirs is the main reason for the
absence of oil banks, and hence for the lack of
implementation of EOR. This is hardly a heretical
statement, but too little has been accomplished in
response to this observation. Indeed, all approaches
proposed and tested to date for improving sweep
efficiency are designed such that they make it harder
to increase oil production rates, because they all hinge
on reducing mobility along preferential flow paths in
the reservoir. Only if the approach successfully
establishes an oil bank can the production rate
increase, and this rarely occurs. Thus, there is a
rationale for another shift in paradigm.
Rather than implementing methods that obstruct
the best flow paths in the reservoir, methods should be
sought that take advantage of these paths, causing oil
to move into them from elsewhere in the formation.
Methods designed under the assumption that injected
fluids will flow through the oil-containing rock are
unlikely to be optimal in the situation that often arises
in the field where injected fluids flow around and past
the oil-containing rock.
Technology developments outside the oil industry
are unlikely to change the future of EOR in the near
to medium term, with the possible exception of the
replacement of gasoline and diesel automobiles with
electric or hybrid vehicles. The technology within the
oil industry most likely to affect the future of EOR is
drilling. If the cost of placing a well of any diameter
in a reservoir could be reduced by one or two orders
of magnitude, it would revolutionize all stages of
recovery, but it would advance EOR in particular.
Bibliography
Everdingen A. van, Kriss H. (1980) A proposal to improve
recovery efficiency, «Journal of Petroleum Technology»,
July, 1164-1168.
Holm L. (1972) Residual oil: can we recover it economically?,
Society of Petroleum Engineers, SPE 4495.
Lake L.W. (1989) Enhanced oil recovery, Englewood Cliffs
(NJ), Prentice-Hall.
235
NEW UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
Lake L.W. et al. (1992) A niche for enhanced oil recovery in
the 1990s, «Oilfield Review», January, 55-61.
National Research Council (1979) U.S. energy supply
prospects to 2010: the report of the Supply and delivery
panel to the Committee on nuclear and alternative energy
sources, Washington (D.C.), National Academy of Science.
Netschert B. (1958) The future supply of oil and gas, Baltimore
(MD), Johns Hopkins Press.
Stalkup F. (1983) Status of miscible displacement, «Journal
of Petroleum Technology», April, 815-826.
References
Moritis G. (2004) EOR continues to unlock oil resources, «Oil
and Gas Journal», 102, 45-52.
236
NAS (US National Academy of Sciences) (1974) Energy: future
alternatives and risks, Cambridge (MA), Ballinger.
National Petroleum Council (1984) Enhanced oil recovery,
Washington (D.C.), National Petroleum Council.
National Research Council (1982) Outlook for science
and technology: the next five years. A report of the
National research council, San Francisco (CA), W.H.
Freeman.
Simmons M. (2002) The world’s giant oil fields, M. King
Hubbert Center for Petroleum Supply Studies, Golden (CO),
Hubbert Center Newsletter #2002/1.
Steven L. Bryant
Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas, USA
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HYDROCARBONS