The saddest CO2 flood failure of all time

CO2 floods promise great recovery at a low cost. But how good is the recovery really?

One operator ended a miscible CO2 pilot to stating that the experiment achieved its objective but the incremental recovery was only 3%.

In the end, he found it hard to tell how much recovery should be attributed to the CO2 injection trial.

In his application documents, you can see

• his conclusions,
• his flood set up and pattern,
• his CO2 source,
• his injection volumes,
• his production results, and
• the UWI of his injector.

Help yourself to his application documents through our secure checkout.

The promise of CO2

CO2 promises great, cheap recovery. CO2 costs per tonne are about a tenth of the cost of natural gas.

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.

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.

If you think a miscible flood expert is expensive, just wait until you hire an amateur

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

For example, one company I know was operating a miscible flood. I met their sole young flood engineer. He had completed a university project on miscible flooding which included a simulation. It was very inexpensive to hire him.

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

The company ended up in receivership. We could have saved it.

It's really very costly to hire inexperienced people.

More than injectant

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

Tags: Gas Injection, Flood

Granger Low   13 Mar 2017

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