Posted on 04/21/2005 11:41:00 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Some 22 billion barrels of stranded oil could be recovered from onshore California -- including mature fields in the Kern County area -- with the application of carbon dioxide technologies.
This is according to a series of reports the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy released Wednesday.
Nationwide, the reports indicate there is potential to recover more than 43 billion barrels of oil from stranded oil resources in six regions using the latest CO2 enhanced oil recovery techniques. The regions include onshore Gulf Coast, offshore Louisiana, Oklahoma, Alaska, Illinois and onshore California.
According to the Office of Fossil Energy, developing these resources would provide significant revenues to state treasuries, create thousands of new jobs and reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil.
David Beecy, director of Future Oil and Gas Resources at the Office of Fossil Energy, said applying state-of-the-art CO2 practices to certain oil fields in the Kern County area could stem the ongoing, natural decline of oil production this area is experiencing -- much the same way thermal enhanced oil recovery, where steam is injected into oil reservoirs, revitalized production here in the 1960s.
Since peaking in 1985, oil production in Kern County has steadily declined 5 percent to 6 percent a year, the result of maturing oil fields.
CO2 enhanced oil recovery practices, first used in the United States in 1972, have been most successful in southern Wyoming and in the Permian Basin in west Texas.
"In that one basin, they have pretty much stabilized production," Beecy said.
Occidental Petroleum Corp. in Los Angeles has experience using CO2 in its operations in the Permian Basin. Locally, the company operates Elk Hills, a light oil and natural gas field near Taft.
The reports from the Office of Fossil Energy point out that while the San Joaquin Basin is best known for its huge heavy oil fields, including Kern River and Midway-Sunset, it also contains large, light-grade oil fields "that may be amenable" to CO2 technologies, including Elk Hills (the Stevens formation), Coalinga East Extension (Nose area), Kettleman North Dome (Temblor) and South Cuyama (Homan).
However, CO2 practices have been tested in Kern County in the past without much success.
ARCO injected CO2 into the Stevens formation in the North Coles Levee field in 1981 and 1984 but, according to the report, technical problems led to high CO2-to-oil ratios.
ChevronTexaco initiated a project in 2000 alternating water and CO2 injection in the Lost Hills field. The project was abandoned two years later.
"It did not produce the results we were looking for," ChevronTexaco spokeswoman Carla Musser said Wednesday. The company, she said, has moved on to testing other technologies.
Beecy said some major and independent oil producers have expressed interest in CO2 technology. He declined to name the companies for proprietary reasons.
State oil and gas supervisor Hal Bopp said the lack of a steady, substantial source of CO2 has always been the challenge to applying CO2 practices in the local oil fields.
Beecy said "someone would need to construct a pipeline" that would transport CO2 to the oil fields.
"There are some natural CO2 deposits in Arizona," he said.
Bopp said he can foresee a day when CO2 emissions from industrial smoke stacks are possibly reinjected into oil reservoirs to help produce oil.
"Nationwide, the reports indicate there is potential to recover more than 43 billion barrels of oil from stranded oil resources in six regions using the latest CO2 enhanced oil recovery techniques. The regions include onshore Gulf Coast, offshore Louisiana, Oklahoma, Alaska, Illinois and onshore California. "
This is great news. I hope we pursue those technologies.
We need to do everything to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
You are behind the curve, we've been working on this for years in Norway. (Or at leats the politicians have been talking about it for years) This could extend the lifespan of our oilfields by as much as 15 years. The limiting factor is not the oil tecnology, but CO2 recovery. Hopefully kyoto will speed that tecnology along.
OK everybody, EXHALE!
In the Permian basin of West texas, they have been using secondary recovery, water injection for 40+ years. CO2 injection is tertiary recovery and theat has been used on certain fields for 20+ years. At one time TXU Electric was discussing puttong a CO2 scrubber on the 500MW unit 6 at the Morgan Creek plant to get the CO@ for injection into a nearby field. The price of oil dropped drastically after President Reagan decontrolled it and the project was no longer economically feasible. I was told recently that oil prices have to stay above $40/bbl for CO2 injection to pay. There is a lot more fracking work, acid injection, co2 injection and recovery equipment and higher maintenance costs.
Nooooooooo ---- We're gonna die!
I see that you are looking for subsidies. No dice. Kyoto is all about controlling who gets to make money. It has nothing to do with the environment.
There are real environmental problems due to CO2 that nobody talks about. Global Warming isn't one of them.
Hey, if european countries are willing to subsidise CO2 collection, and sell it to our oil industry at a discount, we would stand to gain a great deal. Consider it reparations for the subsidies they levy against our exports. (I'm Norwegian)
What's wrong in recognizing positive side effects of silly policy?
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