Page 11 - Primer on Enhanced Oil Recovery

2 Primer on Enhanced Oil Recovery

natural, market and political forces. However, what is inevitable is the rise of oil
production price. This is dictated by more difficult extraction conditions, growing
complexities of extraction technologies and the need for an oil fields infrastructure
maintenance, upgrades and developments.
One of the most important facts about oil extraction is that we newer can extract
all oil from the real oil field, e.g. from the underground reserve. Depending on our
luck and with not so great difficulties we can extract only 10 30% of the oil in
place. With a bit of well-developed technology and additional efforts we can push
our extraction to around 50%. With all our technology on the industrial scale we
would most probable not be able to get much above 80% of extracted of oil in
place.
The last 25 30% of oil in place extraction (remember that almost 20% of oil we
would never be extracted) needs employment of all knowledge and skill we have
developed and accumulated. The additional deployment and production technolo-
gies most likely can cost us up to $20 per barrel. It is immediately clear that the
technology use can significantly reduce profit margins. Complex economic model-
ing and forecasting need to be used to sustain profitability in the oil production pro-
cess. Political and local considerations also come into the account. All this makes
oil extraction a very complex business indeed.
This book is about our desire to extract above-mentioned additional 25 30% of
oil in place after straightforward techniques extract first 50% of oil. Oil extraction
becomes quite complex at this stage so it is named Enhanced Oil Extraction (EOR).
The authors of this book tried their best to guide the reader to build his/her knowl-
edge from simple concepts to the basic understanding of EOR techniques. There
are many books and texts on EOR methods including classic book by D.W. Green
and G.P. Wilhite. So why another book? We, the authors, have tried our best to
reflect on the current pool of people involved in oil production at all stages and
from all business sides. More and more people without broad technical knowledge
such us accountants, bankers, environmentalists, politicians and public, in some
cases, are involved in policies forming and decision taking. We in any measure do
not judge their technical knowledge but we tried our best to widen their knowledge
horizon.
We, the authors, all have done our best to present material on the introductory
but appropriate level. VV had initiated this book writing, generally planned it and
overlooked the process. VV has also predominantly written Chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, 9,
14 and 17. BS has primarily written chapters 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15 and 16. AS has
principally written chapters 2 and 6. EZ took part in writing Chapters 3 and 12.
Having great respect for mathematics we nevertheless used it in the book as little
as possible. This has been done on the reflection that many things can be reason-
ably well known without familiarity of exact mathematical ways to arrive to certain
conclusions. At the same time, the average complexity equations do not help much
to arrive to technically applicable results. Detailed description, on the other side, is
very complex and should to be left to the people who do it every day. We are sure
that if the readers would get a knowledge presented in this book and then decide to
deepen their understanding of the physical or chemical phenomena, they will have