Recovery of More Oil from Known Fields
Authors: Geffen Ted M. 
Published: December 2007

American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, Inc.

This paper was prepared for the 1974 Eastern Regional Meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers of AIME, to be held in Washington, D.C., Nov. 14–15, 1974. Permission to copy is restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words. Illustrations may not be copied. The abstract should contain conspicuous acknowledgment of where and by whom the paper is presented. Publication elsewhere after publication in the JOURNAL paper is presented. Publication elsewhere after publication in the JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY or the SOCIETY OF PETROLEUM ENGINEERS JOURNAL is granted upon request to the Editor of the appropriate journal provided agreement to give proper credit is made.

Discussion of this paper is invited. Three copies of any discussion should be sent to the Society of Petroleum Engineers office. Such discussion may be presented at the above meeting and, with the paper, may be considered for publication in one of the SPE magazines.

Already found U. S. oil fields contain billions of barrels of oil that are not recoverable by conventional methods. The target for recovery by improved methods is about 59 billion barrels. This current tertiary oil target will be larger as more fields are discovered and expected advances in technology are made. The most promising means to recover this hard-to-get oil are by methods generally referred to as miscible and thermal. Although considerable research effort and field testing have been done, the state-of-the-art has not reached the level that commercial applications can be installed without a degree of risk above that historically experienced by oil producers. Intensive research, together with extensive field testing, is needed to provide the know-how for commercially applying the heavily financially front-loaded improved methods. In addition, the availability of needed special chemicals and hardware in large quantities must improve to allow widespread applications. Both the oil industry and the government face a tremendous challenge to accomplish the job of capturing this additional oil in a short time frame and so ease the energy crisis.

Introduction

Liquid hydrocarbons are currently supplying about 50% of the U.S. energy consumption. However, the domestic producing ability is on the decline, and at a rate which is considered greater than can be, in the near term, replaced by other energy forms. This means more liquid hydrocarbon imports which have grown steadily and now total more than 36% of our daily supply. The volume of imports is already so high that it presents frightening prospects to our national security, standard of living, and geopolitical position.

Daily domestic production of crude oil and natural gas liquids currently is about 11 million and imports about 6.2 million, totaling 17.2 million BOPD of consumption. This can be an incomprehensible number. To better appreciate the volume, it can be visualized as the amount of hydrocarbon liquids that daily would fill a railroad train of standard size tank cars about 550 miles long, or the distance by highway from Washington, D.C. to Detroit, Michigan. Increasing the supply by even a noticeable amount, say 1%, is in volume terms a very substantial task (5.5 miles of oil-filled tank cars per day).