Oil & Gas Journal would like help from its its readers in updating its enhanced oil recover survey, which over the years has provided the industry a comprehensive list of worldwide EOR activity.
Surveys of various petroleum operations have been part of OGJ's coverage for many years. The EOR survey is one that OGJ publishes every 2 years. The Apr. 12, 2004, issue will include the 2004 survey, and subscribers, after Apr. 12, also will be able to access the survey in a .pdf format on www.ogjonline.com or receive the entire issue electronically from qMags, if they choose that magazine delivery option.
The process of obtaining the EOR data takes several months; we recently e-mailed the first batch of survey forms to respondents of the 2002 survey. As in past surveys, we expect the process of updating the survey for many projects will require us to make several attempts before the right person receives the survey forms.
Although EOR projects tend to be long-lived, companies and people operating them change frequently, making it difficult at times to locate the right people. Usually persons working directly with EOR projects are very interested in providing the updates, but it may take time to locate them, especially if the company is large.
EOR projects
The 2004 EOR survey represents the 16th time that OGJ will publish the survey. Some of the oldest EOR projects, as shown in the 2002 survey, are those that use steam for enhancing oil recovery. Venezuela's steam oil recovery in East Tía Juana field began April 1959, and the South Belridge field steam oil recovery project in Kern County, Calif., started in 1960. South Belridge, as shown in the 2002 survey, still produced 45,000 b/d in 2002.
The oldest listed carbon dioxide injection project is in the SACROC Unit, Scurry County, Tex., that started in 1972, and currently KinderMorgan CO2 LLC has significantly increased the volume of oil recovery in that field.
The projects in the 2002 survey producing the most oil are steam projects such as the 150,000 b/d of enhanced oil produced by ChevronTexaco Corp. unit PT Caltex from Duri field in Sumatra, Indonesia, the 128,000 bo/d produced by Imperial Oil Ltd. from Cold Lake in Alberta, and the 100,000 bo/d produced by ChevronTexaco from Kern River field, in Kern County.
BP PLC also has large hydrocarbon-miscible EOR projects on the North Slope of Alaska in Prudhoe Bay, Kuparuk River, and several other fields.
Although these large projects greatly influence the total EOR volumes produced in the world, the survey also lists small projects and pilot projects that contribute only a few EOR barrels.
Projects included in the survey are those in which injectants other than water or methane are injected in to the reservoir for enhancing oil recovery. The injection may occur during the initial production stage, after the primary depletion stage, or after the secondary production stage, which also is referred to as tertiary recovery.
The most common projects involve injecting steam in heavy oil fields, carbon dioxide in lighter oil fields, hydrocarbon-miscible gas in lighter oil fields, and chemical and polymer in lighter oil fields.
Also the survey lists projects with nitrogen and flue gas injection, and air injection in projects with in situ combustion.
Contact information
If you have not received an e-mail survey form, and you are interested in either updating the information shown in the Aug. 15, 2002, survey, or adding information on projects not listed please let us know by sending an e-mail to Jeanne Stell at [email protected] or to Guntis Moritis at [email protected].