The U.S. Department of Energy is kicking off a major research and field demonstration program aimed at minimizing well abandonments and helping operators maximize oil recovery from U.S. reservoirs.
Goal of the Oil Research Program is to maximize the economic productive capacity of the U.S. oil resource by research, development, and demonstration.
DOE believes 76 billion bbl of oil could be made economically producible using technologies currently in use or that could be developed within 10 years.
The agency has scheduled a symposium Jan. 29-30, 1991, at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport Hyatt Regency Hotel to provide a forum for producers, service companies, reservoir characterization specialists, and other technical managers to share information about U.S. fields with unstructured deltaic formations.
It defines those as deltaic reservoirs in which production is not severely constrained by structural compartmentalization. Those reservoirs have been identified as having the largest remaining oil resource threatened by near term abandonment, DOE said.
Examples include the Pennsylvanian Bartlesville, Prue, and Morrow sands of the Midcontinent, Pennsylvanian Strawn in North Texas, Cretaceous D and J sands in Colorado, Cretaceous Frontier in Wyoming, Pennsylvanian Robinson and Mississippian Cypress in Illinois, Mississippian Big Injun and Berea in Appalachia, Eocene Wilcox along the Gulf Coast, and Miocene Temblor in California.
HOW IT WILL WORK
DOE began working on the program last January.
It plans to divide U.S. reservoirs into about 12 classes. It has so far categorized 2,000 of the nation's largest reservoirs in 25 of the 29 producing states.
DOE said unstructured deltaic reservoirs in more than 15 states contain more than 28 billion bbl of unrecovered crude.
The most important technical ranking criteria are the potential for incremental recovery by advanced technology, and urgency, defined by how much time remains before access is lost to a large part of the class because of well abandonments.
DOE will conduct technical meetings regarding each reservoir class to discuss the technologies that may increase productivity.
For example, the Dallas meeting will consist of a series of short technical presentations by specialists in reservoir characterization, extraction processes and technologies, and economic and environmental factors.
Question and answer and discussion periods will allow exchange of experiences, problems, and solutions in deltaic environments. A proceedings volume will be distributed later.
Subsequent meetings will be set up for other reservoir classes.
THREE OBJECTIVES
The program contains near term, midterm, and long term strategies. In the near term, within 5 years, DOE hopes to preserve access to reservoirs with high potential that are rapidly approaching their economic limits.
Economic recovery of the 76 billion bbl of oil assumes use of existing wells, but the accelerating rate of plugging could eliminate economic access to as much as two thirds of the remaining oil by 1995, DOE studies showed.
Within a 10 year midterm it hopes to develop, test, and transfer the best currently defined advanced technologies to operators of reservoirs with the greatest potential for incremental recovery.
Over the longer term it hopes to develop enough fundamental understanding to define new recovery techniques for the oil left after application of the most advanced, currently defined midterm processes and for major classes of reservoirs for which no advanced technologies are anticipated to be available in the midterm.
DOE will continue to support university research.
THE PAYOFF
The agency said it hopes federal funding for the program will be $540-626 million during 15-21 years starting in 1991. It said production of 76 billion bbl of oil, the program target, would generate as much as $400 billion in revenues to the public sector from severance and income taxes, or 900 times program cost.
Incremental production would create more than 300,000 jobs and reduce oil imports barrel for barrel.
At a 2000 oil price of $32/bbl, the 76 billion bbl would displace more than $2 trillion that would otherwise be paid to non-U.S. oil suppliers.
BROADENED PROGRAM
A cost shared program of about 25 field demonstration tests begun in the 1970s produced a great deal of information and contributed greatly to the current appreciation of the formidable problems to be overcome before enhanced oil recovery can be widely used, says a DOE publication that summarizes the new program.
Much of the data is stored in the DOE's Tertiary Oil Recovery Information System (Toris) data base in Bartlesville, Okla., said Edith A. Allison, Class 1 reservoir manager at DOE's Bartlesville Project Office and manager of the Dallas symposium.
An incentive program in the 1980s spawned more than 400 EOR projects. Operators continued to file annual progress reports on the projects even after the requirement was changed from mandatory to voluntary, DOE said. Those factors indicate operators' willingness to cooperate in cost shared projects, DOE said.
In the past 18 months, DOE has broadened its programs to heighten emphasis on immediate oil field use.
The Interstate Oil Compact Commission, Oklahoma City, recently completed a series of surveys and workshops to determine the best approach to reaching independent producer groups.
Another effort is the Oil Recovery Technology Partnership. It is a cooperative research venture between Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, oil companies, and research organizations.
Designed to adapt advanced technology developed under weapons programs to uses in the oil industry, it is operating two field projects to assess the effect of fractures on production. It also operates the Crosswell Seismic Forum, a multicompany group focusing on development of improved downhole seismic instruments for crosswell tomography.
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