Say what you will about whatever component of the US Government is currently annoying you, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) continues to beaver away on worthwhile projects, to good effect.

A case in point is a project that has, as they put it in a recent report, “breathed new life into one of America’s largest mature producing oil fields.”

The project is expected to eventually add 13 million bbl of incremental oil production in a small portion of the 73-year-old Wilmington oil field in Long Beach, Calif. They say that if new technologies and techniques developed under the project are applied field-wide, it could boost Wilmington’s ultimate oil recovery by 525 million bbl. That jump, in a single oil field, is a 2.5% increase in total US proved oil reserves. An aggressive effort to transfer this technology could boost reserves in similar fields along the California coast by 1.4 billion bbl.

Since 1932, more than 3,400 land wells have been drilled in the western portion
of Wilmington oil field. By the 1950s, that portion had been completely developed under primary recovery, and waterflooding was started to increase recovery and control subsidence.

Tidelands Oil Production Co. operates the western portion of the field as a subcontractor to the field owner, the City of Long Beach. Tidelands’ project called for using advanced reservoir characterization and thermal production technologies together with horizontal drilling to improve the efficiency of a deep, heavy oil steamflood in Wilmington field. Steamflooding had been economic there even when oil prices were low because the operators had access to a low-cost source of steam from a nearby power plant. That source became unavailable when the plant shut down, which drove the development of technologies to improve the efficiency and economics of heavy oil recovery.

As described in the NETL report, Tidelands developed some interesting new tools for the project:
• An advanced computer model to simulate the Wilmington reservoir, which it used to optimize steam, hot water and water injection without causing surface subsidence, a perennial problem in the field;
• New horizontal well-based steamflooding designed with new three-dimensional computer models;
• A novel alkaline-steam well completion technique that controls excessive production of sand in the well bore, cutting capital costs by 25%;
• A new, commercial technology to scrub out H2S created in the steamflood at a 50% cost reduction; and
• A new steam generator that can burn a variety of low-quality waste gases created by the thermal enhanced oil recovery operations.

The project started up in 1995 and is concluding this year. Department of Energy (DOE) funding is expected to account for 40% of the project’s estimated total cost of more than US $20 million.

NETL project manager Jim Barnes noted that two companies are now marketing DOE-supported technologies as a result of the project: Dynamic Graphics, Inc. (DGI), Alameda, Calif., and Geomechanics International Inc. (GMI), Houston.

“Tidelands teamed with Stanford and the University of Southern California during many of their investigative efforts,” Barnes added. “GMI was started by Stanford researchers, who developed novel well logs calibrated to accurately measure porosity and oil saturation through soundwave technology.”

Producing more of what we already know is there is central to any rational energy plan. This is great stuff and a harbinger of things to come.

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