The Hindu Business Line : Enhanced oil recovery possible from existing oilfields: Expert

Mumbai, July 2 For the world deeply concerned over soaring crude prices with no upper limit in sight, a new study by renowned petroleum consultant Dr Rafael Sandrea should bring some hope. Dr Sandrea is the President of Oklahoma-based IPC Petroleum Consultants Inc and has authored a book ‘FutureOil and Gas Supply - A Quantitative Analysis’.

A major campaign of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) implemented in the world’s thousands of aging oil fields will be crucial for sustaining future global oil supply, according to the expert who asserted that scarcely 10 percent of the world’s conventional crude oil reserves discovered to date has been produced.

That leaves 90 per cent of the world’s conventional discovered oil volume, or 10 trillion barrels of oil remaining un-produced in oilfields today. Interestingly, this does not include the huge volumes of oil recoverable from unconventional deposits such as oil sands, tar sands, extra-heavy oil or oil shale, he emphasised.

Enhanced oil recovery entails injecting gases, chemicals, heat energy, or microbes into reservoirs to boost incremental oil recovery from oil fields that have otherwise passed their prime.

It represents the final stage of an oil producer’s efforts to extract the last drop of oil that is economically and technically feasible to recover from a reservoir.

Dr Sandrea estimates the average recovery rate — the percentage of the original-oil-in-place resource recoverable from a reservoir — of the world’s conventional oil fields at 22 per cent.

“Boosting that number by a single percentage point through enhanced oil recovery would add more than 100 billion barrels of oil to the world’s proven reserves — equal to four years of total global crude oil production at current rates,” he said.

Enhanced oil recovery techniques are not new. They have been implemented for decades, mostly in the US. But today it accounts for a small fraction of global oil production.

According to Dr Sandrea a concerted effort to implement new enhanced oil recovery projects worldwide “is not an option; it’s a must”.

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