Managing Future Petroleum Recovery
Authors: Glenn Wayne E. 
Published: December 2007

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

This paper was prepared for the 48th Annual Fall Meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers of AIME, to be held in Las Vegas, Nev., Sept. 30-Oct. 3, 1973. 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 OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY or the SOCIETY OF PETROLEUM ENGINEERS JOURNAL is usually 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 two SPE magazines.

The importance of improving our rate of recovery from domestic petroleum reservoirs is underscored by the increasing difficulty of finding significant new reserves to meet the nation's increasing demand for energy. Crude oil offers the greatest opportunity for improvement. The average recovery rate from known oil fields is 31 percent. For every 1 percent increase in the average, the nation would gain more than 4 billion bbl of additional crude with fewer environmental and political implications. One solution lies in greater emphasis on research - on an individual company and on a cooperative basis, within and without the industry. But a more immediate solution lies in improved application of existing technology as regards selection and quality control of materials, rigorous application of procedures and the training and supervision of personnel.

Introduction

The subject is "Managing Future Petroleum Recovery" and, to me, the key word in this title is "managing". In the brief time available, I would like to illustrate some of the ways the application of sound management techniques can improve petroleum recovery and reduce damage to oil- and gas-bearing formations.

With America's present energy problems, the motivation for recovering as much as possible of the in-place reserves is greater than ever before. We now face the uncomfortable-and potentially dangerous-situation where the gap between our energy requirements and available energy supplies is widening every day. All of the so-called "easy oil" has been found in this country. So, we must drill deeper to tap the tighter, hotter, geopressured reservoirs - and this is both expensive and risky. Even when commercial results are achieved, there is usually less oil and gas in these reservoirs.

Consequently, the search for new domestic supplies has shifted in large measure to increasingly hostile environments such as the Alaskan North Slope and the offshore waters along the outer continental shelves of the United States. These changes in production operations have meant both significantly higher costs production operations have meant both significantly higher costs and fewer and fewer new commercial discoveries.

Part of the answer to the shortage, at least for the short term, has been to import more crude oil. But we have already found this to be a less than ideal solution for a number of reasons.