CO2 miscible flood in optimal conditions can recover additional oil comprising around 11% of the original oil in place.
http://petrowiki.org/Miscible_flooding
The oil industry has been CO2 flooding oilfields since the mid-1970s.
The assertion of a 30 fold increase in oil production is a misleading and meaningless number. I am an officer in a public oil and gas production company. I see articles by this DeLillo all the time, and he is always making rash, brash and unsubstantiated assertions. DeLillo has a penchant for hyperbole and wildly erroneous information, that is often put into the public domain as “journalism” opining on relative values and upside in portfolio of certain oil and gas companies, in which his hedge fund controllers have taken either long or short positions. He does no basic research and is not an oil and gas production expert, nor is he a real energy analyst.
CO2 miscible flood in optimal conditions can recover additional oil comprising around 11% of the original oil in place.
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you understand that this statement is not out of variance with DeLillo statement that CO2 enhancement can deliver up to a 30 fold increase in well production.
Why?
Because “11% of the original oil IN PLACE.” is many orders of magnitude higher than commercially accessible oil. In the Baaken/Three Forks formation for example Continental has recently doubled their estimates of oil IN PLACE to over 900 billion barrels of which as much as 45 billion barrels is commercially accessible.
Now consider again your statement that “CO2 miscible flood in optimal conditions can recover additional oil comprising around 11% of the original oil IN PLACE.”
So you take 11% of 900 billion barrels and what is that? 95 billion barrels? suddenly you’re getting a number that looks like what DeLillo is talking about.
I could be completely wrong here. All I’m doing is following your logic.
Heck some of the biggest cheapest coal fields in the world are in north east wyoming. You could turn that coal into electricity and then use the CO2 for enhanced oil recovery in the neighborhood.