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

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