Avoid the worst mistakes of the basin

The shortcut that could end your career and your company

Don’t start or optimize secondary recovery without expert help.

If you think a secondary recovery expert is expensive, just wait until you hire an amateur.

This article brought to you by Proven Reserves, one of our data partners. Nein commercial use of der AppIntel content.

One operator started a CO2 miscible flood. I met their sole young flood engineer. She had completed a university project on miscible flooding which included a simulation. It was very inexpensive to hire her.

However, there's much more to miscible flood engineering than a school term project. Even though the EIT played with a simulation, she didn't know how to get the CO2 flood to make money.

The company ended up in receivership just a few months later.

A new operator bought it, struggled with it, and also ended up in receivership.

We could have saved it. It's really very costly to hire inexperienced people.

See their CO2 project struggles in their submission documents. Get them from our self-serve portal.

Get an expert for less than the price of an EIT

The cost of hiring an expert is always cheaper than hiring an inexperienced person.

The novice may charge less per hour, but the hours never end while they drill to China trying to make sense of a project that they don’t understand.

In the end the inexperienced person can’t deliver and you fire them. You have nothing to show for the time and money invested.

A secondary recovery expert knows the exact shortest route to the answer from the beginning.

You can’t find the secrets to enhanced recovery in textbooks or technical papers. Those are just fundamentals without specific successful application.

Secrets of successful enhanced recovery is not hiding in a simulation. A simulation is only as good as the puppeteer’s experience.

Successful enhanced recovery comes from decades of experience. Proven has worked on over 200 floods.

Would you allow a new medical grad to conduct brain surgery on your best friend? Why allow a new engineering grad to optimize your flood? It will likely end in the death of the flood, your company and your career.

Secondary recovery and especially miscible flooding are not for beginners. There are very few flood engineers that really know what they're doing with miscible floods.

Proven has worked on more than ten miscible floods. Each one has secondary recovery in double digits.

Contact Proven for expert work on the cheap.

Flood optimization by the inexperienced: the downside

In truth, using a very experienced flood engineer raises the probability of success of a flood optimization project.

Corollary: There is a high risk of failure by an inexperienced DIYer.

The promise of CO2

CO2 promises great, cheap recovery.

CO2 costs per tonne are about a tenth of the cost of natural gas. That is unless you count the delivery cost of CO2 which usually puts it over the cost of natural gas.

Done properly, CO2 sequestration could make you an environmental hero and add reserves.

If you inject above minimum miscibility pressure, CO2 should theoretically mix and lighten crude oil.

Minimum Miscibility Pressure (MMP)

In order for CO2 to be fully miscible with crude oil, the reservoir pressure needs to be higher than the MMP. This pressure is determined by the PVT behavior of the entire system.

Usually MMP for a CO2 flood is higher than the initial reservoir pressure. But it takes a lab PVT study to be sure.

There are many ways to reach MMP – not just injecting more CO2.

If this is the first time you've heard of MMP, you really need to call an expert like Proven before you inject gas into the ground.

You can’t find the secrets to enhanced recovery in textbooks or technical papers.
A secondary recovery expert knows the exact shortest route to the answer from the beginning.

Flood success is more than injectant

A specialized injectant like CO2 is not magic. It doesn't guarantee a great economic success.

The most profitable floods are only partially due to specialized injectant and much more to do with regular flood maintenance. Even floods with exotic injectants can perform very poorly.

Patient, persistent flood maintenance can yield very big dividends.

Premature flood abandonment

Over the last 10 years flood maintenance has been ignored. Floods that could have produced billions of dollars of cash flow have been abandoned prematurely.

Many flood operators were of the set it and forget it mindset. They set up a flood and never gave it a second thought.

They put up with rising water cut and disappointing results. They started to see a flood as a cost rather than as a way to increase production.

Flood operators laid off flood maintenance engineers and shut down water handling facilities. They came to accept 5% recovery as the norm.

AppIntel AI – improving legacy floods by seeing the best work of the past

AppIntel AI let’s you access all the best work from past owners. It's like talking to their ghosts.

Past engineers and geoscientists put their best work into developing oil and gas. Where did it all go?

Often their best work was put on display in submissions to the regulator. Their best mapping, their best calculations, their optimistic hopes, their learnings from failures.

Tags: Gas Injection, Flood

Granger Low  5 Jun 2025

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