Life after miscible flood

A first contact miscible flood is a tertiary recovery pool that has solvent injected. The solvent mixes immediately with the existing pool's crude. The concept is to reduce the viscosity and adhesion forces to improve oil recovery on a microscopic level.

The operator of one of the miscible floods in the province has decided that it is no longer economic to flood the pool with solvent. They are moving toward an end-game phase.

Also included is a very interesting flood history of this pool. An economic analysis is also included for your review. If you're interested in this technology, these can be used as a primer on miscible flooding.

Download their application documents from our self serve application portal.

In their application you can see their basin wide pay mapping over 35 townships. They also include more detailed seismic isopach interpretation over 10 sections. If you're interested in buying in this area, you'll be able to see this operator's current prospectivity.

Miscible flooding has great potential

When applied to the right oil pool, miscible flooding can enable great oil recoveries. Some miscible floods claim recovery of 75% of the oil in place. Compare this will primary recovery of 25% or less.

Imagine if all the conventional oil pools in Western Canada could triple their recovery. Unfortunately very few of Alberta's conventional oil pools are under miscible flood.

To put that in perspective, Alberta has only produced 16 billion barrels of conventional oil in its entire history. There's more oil left to produce under miscible flooding than we have ever produced -- in fact more than three times as much.

Sizable oil pools in this comparison were over 170 e3m3(1 MMBO). Pools under this size are not usually considered large enough to flood.

The reason there are very few miscible floods is because the injectant is much more expensive than water. However, water and oil are not miscible. Therefore oil recovery in a miscble flood is much higher than in a water flood.

Famous miscible floods

Miscible flooding is not new. The first miscible floods started in the 1960s.

The oil pools on the Alaska North Slope have been miscibly flooded since the start of production. Because there is no market for natural gas on the Beaufort Sea, using natural gas as an injectant was the perfect solution for this area.

But there are far more miscible floods in Alberta than there are anywhere else. And you can find them quickly with AppIntel. After logging in, just type into the KiP search box  miscible flood .

Tags: Gas Injection, Flood

Granger Low   29 Jul 2016

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