CO2-EOR
www.CO2-EOR.com

What is CO2-EOR?

CO2 EOR is an "enhanced oil recovery" technology that injects CO2 (carbon dioxide) into an underground geologic zone (oil/hydrocarbon containing "reservoir") that contains hydrocarbons for the purpose of producing the oil. The CO2 is produced along with the oil and then recovered and re-injected to recover more oil.

When the maximum amount of oil is recovered from the reservoir, the CO2 is then "sequestered" in the underground geologic zone that formerly contained the oil and the well is shut-in, permanently sequestering the CO2.

The Following is a Press Release from the Department of Energy Regarding CO2-EOR

New CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery Technology
Could Greatly Boost U.S. Oil Supplies

Reports See Another 89-430 Billion Barrels of Oil Through Carbon Dioxide Injection, Other Advances

Washington, DC – State-of-the-art enhanced oil recovery with carbon dioxide, now recognized as a potential way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, could add 89 billion barrels to the recoverable oil resources of the United States, the Department of Energy has determined. Current U.S. proved reserves are 21.9 billion barrels.

The 89-billion-barrel jump in resources was one of a number of possible increases identified in a series of assessments done for the Department which also found that, in the longer term, multiple advances in technology and widespread sequestration of industrial carbon dioxide could eventually add as much as 430 billion new barrels to the technically recoverable resource.

Beginning efforts to develop the 89-billion-barrel addition to resources would depend on the availability of commercial CO2 in large volumes. If this oil could be added to the category of proven reserves, the U.S. would have the fifth largest oil reserves in the world behind Iraq, which has 115 billion barrels, based on present estimates; and an additional 430 billion barrels would make it first, ahead of Saudi Arabia with 261 billion barrels. The capture of CO2 from combustion in power generation and other industrial uses is the subject of other research and development programs sponsored by the Office of Fossil Energy.

Next-generation enhanced recovery with carbon dioxide was judged to be a "game-changer" in oil production, one capable of doubling recovery efficiency. And geologic sequestration of industrial carbon dioxide in declining oil fields was endorsed last year as a potential method of reducing greenhouse base emissions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Done in compliance with the National Energy Policy Act of 2005 and other Congressional directives, the assessments looked at maximizing oil production and accelerating the productive use of carbon dioxide in all categories of petroleum resources, including as-yet undiscovered oil and the new resources in the residual oil zone. The findings are consolidated in the February 2006 report Undeveloped Domestic Oil Resources: The Foundation for Increasing Oil Production and a Viable Domestic Oil Industry.

The 430 billion barrel potential was identified in increments of up to 110 billon barrels from applying today's state-of-the-art enhanced recovery in discovered fields – 90 billion in light oil, 20 billion in heavy oil; up to 179 billion barrels from undiscovered oil – 119 billion from conventional technology, 60 billion from enhanced recovery; up to 111 billion barrels from reserve growth – 71 billion from conventional technology, 40 billion from enhanced recovery; up to 20 billion from tapping the residual oil zone with enhanced recovery; and, another 10 billion from tar sands.

The separate assessments and reports contributing to the total resource estimate are: Basin Oriented Assessments, ten assessments of producing U.S. basins and the potential of state-of-the-art enhanced oil recovery; trapped oil in the Residual Oil Zone, five reports looking at new resources in the residual oil zone; and, Evaluation of the Potential for "Game-Changer" Improvements in Oil Recovery Efficiency for CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery, a report on next-generation technology.

The Following is a Press Release from the Department of Energy Regarding CO2-EOR

U.S. Department of Energy • Office of Fossil Energy • Office of Oil and Natural Gas
February 2006

Project Facts
"Game Changer: Improvements Could Dramatically Increase
Domestic Oil Recovery Efficiency

The report, Evaluating the Potential for “Game-Changer” Improvements in Oil Recovery Efficiency from CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery, examines how a step-change in the efficiency of carbon dioxide-based enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) would help to increase oil production from domestic reservoirs.

Currently available primary and secondary oil production technologies recover only about one-third of the oil in-place in domestic reservoirs, leaving behind massive volumes of oil in the ground also referred to as trapped oil. Yet, scientific theory, laboratory tests, and selected field projects show that significant increases in oil recovery efficiency are possible. This technical report examines the role that next generation CO2-EOR technologies could provide in making “game changer” improvements in domestic oil recovery efficiency and in increasing domestic oil production. 

There are three significant findings emerge from this study which include:

1. Traditionally practiced CO2-EOR technology will raise overall domestic oil recovery efficiency by only a few percent. The reasons for this relatively modest performance include: (1) CO2-EOR is still only applied in a few domestic oil basins, primarily the Permian Basin; (2) the traditional form of this technology is economic in a relatively small group of geologically favorable oil reservoirs; and, (3) most important, traditionally used CO2-EOR designs provide only a modest, 10% incremental recovery of the original oil in-place.

2. Integrated application of a suite of the next generation CO2-EOR technologies shows that much higher oil recovery efficiencies -- fully two-thirds of the oil in-place are feasible from an expanded group of domestic oil reservoirs. The analysis shows that a series of “next generation” CO2-EOR technologies could double the oil recovery efficiency from geologically favorable oil reservoirs and raise overall domestic oil recovery efficiency to over 60% of the original oil in place. In addition the next generation CO2-EOR technology could extend the miscible CO2-EOR technology to a broader range of domestic oil reservoirs.

3. Successful development and integrated application of next generation CO2-EOR technologies could add 40 billion barrels of technically recoverable domestic oil resource - from the first six basins/regions in the study. The previously issued six basin-oriented CO2-EOR studies reported that 43.3 billion barrels of domestic oil could become technically recoverable with state-of-the-art CO2-EOR technology. Successful development and integrated application of “next generation” CO2-EOR technologies could increase this to 83.7 billion barrels, from these six domestic oil basins/areas. 

CO2 Injection Boosts Oil Recovery and Captures Carbon Emissions

Technology advances, economic improvements, and environmental needs have aligned to create a "perfect storm" of growth opportunity for a proven method for enhancing oil recovery in the United States: carbon dioxide or CO2 flooding.

A watershed project in Kansas funded by the U.S. Department of Energy seeks to demonstrate that this technology’s time has come, while leveraging energy security, energy efficiency, and environmental benefits in a number of ways. The payoff could be hundreds of millions of barrels of oil in Kansas that otherwise might never be produced.

Until now, enhanced oil recovery (EOR) using CO2 has not been feasible in Kansas because the largest natural sources of CO2 in the United States are hundreds of miles away. The resulting high transportation costs would doom the economic feasibility of any CO2 flooding. Accordingly, all but a handful of CO2 flooding projects are in the Permian basin of West Texas and New Mexico, not far from large deposits of CO2.

The Kansas project takes a different approach, capitalizing on the benefits of what amounts to a unique, scalable model for linked energy systems. It entails using waste heat from a 15-megawatt natural-gas-fired turbine generator to provide thermal energy for a 25 million gallon-per-year corn ethanol plant. The project then recovers some of the CO2 that is a byproduct of the fermentation process involved in corn ethanol production and uses it for a CO2 EOR flood in the Hall-Gurney field in central Kansas.

This project provides several important "firsts" including:

• The first CO2 flooding project in Kansas.
  

• The first time waste CO2 from an ethanol plant has been used for enhanced oil recovery.

Both are significant achievements. If the project proves feasible, it could open the door for additional CO2 flooding projects throughout Kansas. The potential added incremental oil recovered from such an effort could total as much as 600 million barrels of oil in Kansas alone. As many as 6,000 mature oilfields in the state could be saved from abandonment—not to mention the thousands of jobs created from implementing these projects.

CO2 EOR projects are proliferating in the United States as operating costs of these projects and CO2 prices have dropped sharply in recent years. Given the immense volumes of bypassed oil in America’s thousands of mature or declining oilfields, and expectations for persistently high oil prices, expanding CO2 EOR efforts sound like an idea whose time has come.

Furthermore, an enhanced oil recovery project using industrial waste CO2 also "closes the carbon loop" by injecting underground CO2 that otherwise would be vented to the atmosphere. Such carbon sequestration efforts are the subject of intense research and government scrutiny worldwide amid growing concerns over the role that human-created CO2 emissions play in global climate change.

Oil production from the Hall-Gurney CO2 flooding project started up in May 2004, following 6 months of CO2 injection. The pilot project is using only 10 percent of the CO2 stream from the ethanol plant at Russell, Kan., from which the gas is trucked 7 miles to the field site.

One such ethanol plant could supply a small oilfield, capable of producing 5 million barrels of oil and sequestering 1.5 million tons of CO2, for 20 years. If CO2 flooding were implemented across the entire Hall-Gurney oilfield, it would require CO2 waste gas volumes from the equivalent of five such ethanol plants.

Combined, the benefits from integrating power, ethanol production, enhanced oil recovery, and CO2 sequestration could total $88 million over 10 years, if all of the plant’s CO2 were used.

DOE has been funding research into CO2 EOR since the late 1970s. The big commercial expansion of CO2 flooding in U.S. oilfields that began in the 1980s would not have been possible without the groundbreaking fundamental research funded by the Energy Department. The Office of Fossil Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory continues to manage a host of DOE-funded CO2 EOR research and demonstration projects, even as oil company spending for basic enhanced oil recovery research and development has declined in recent years.

Enhanced Oil Recovery:

Enhanced Oil Recovery is the green way to produce America's oil when using carbon emissions (CO2) from fossil-fueled power plants to recover stranded or trapped oil. After recovering the oil, the CO2 is stored in the reservoir where the oil was located. 

Enhanced Oil Recovery promotes U.S. energy independence by reducing foreign oil imports from OPEC & other Middle East countries, as well as Venezuela, Iran, China, Russia and other unfriendly countries.

According to the Department of Energy, Enhanced Oil Recovery is a "game-changer" in that there are nearly 400 Billion Barrels of “Unrecoverable Oil”in the U.S. and that 60%, or 240 Billion barrels of oil, are recoverable through Enhanced Oil Recovery.  At $100/bbl, Enhanced Oil Recovery represents a $24 Trillion market opportunity for the U.S.

CO2 EOR and Enhanced Oil Recovery Solutions 
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