shale EOR

Shale Ingenuity’s first pilot used common natural gas liquids to boost daily output 30-fold from a low-producing horizontal well in Texas.

Pilots and papers are plentiful, but the shale sector has no big enhanced oil recovery projects to speak of. It may just have to stay that way for a while.

Though shelved by low oil prices, the plan to execute the largest enhanced oil recovery program of its kind offers insights into what it may take for the shale sector to escape pilot mode and scale up gas huff ’n’ puff operations.

In this episode, we discuss the state of shale EOR in the US and what hydrocarbon producers need to know about seperator oil shrinkage.

The projects are designed to reduce technical risks in enhanced oil recovery and expand application of EOR methods in conventional and unconventional reservoirs.

There is every reason to believe that enhanced oil recovery through huff-and-puff injections in US tight-oil plays could be a technical success across large numbers of wells. However, widespread economic success remains uncertain.

The low recovery rates observed in most shale reservoirs has prompted a number of research projects to develop new enhanced oil recovery methods.

The Bakken Petroleum System, which includes the Bakken and Three Forks shales in North America, is estimated to hold as much as 900 billion bbl of original oil in place.

The label unconventional oil and gas stubbornly hangs on because these formations cannot be understood using the rules of conventional petroleum engineering.

This paper focuses on the effects of injected-gas composition and fracture properties on oil recovery, concluding that cyclic gas injection in hydraulically fractured shale oil reservoirs is feasible for improving oil production substantially over primary production.