CO₂ Flooding:

As the founding principal in the Annual CO₂ Flooding Conference (http://www.spe-pb.org/), Melzer has found himself immersed in the specific technologies necessary for successful CO₂ flooding.  The willingness of the large oil companies to share their previously tightly-held CO2 technology is best evidenced by the eleven CO₂ flooding shortcourses that Mr. Melzer has directed (http://www.utpb.edu/ceed/co2/shortcourses.html).  With the Permian Basin as a backyard, the opportunities to observe and document the best practices utilized in the 50+ active CO₂ floods has been invaluable.  And now, with the success of the CO₂ Flooding Conference, the backyard has expanded to all of North America and even worldwide as the best minds in all of CO2 flooding have come to participate each year in the Conference.  The coming and potentially explosive growth in CO₂ flooding due to oil prices and CO₂ sequestration will make these best practices even more critical.  Expansion and proliferation of adequate sources of CO₂ is the current challenge.

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Residual Oil Zones:

In the course of historical oil field development, the oil/water contact (OWC) formed the base level of drilling.  When water production became onerous, the best approach was to terminate drilling at the OWC.  Recent work in the Permian Basin has shown that commercial recovery of oil can be found beneath the OWC in what we have come to refer to as residual oil zones (ROZs).  These ROZs can ubiquitous and quite thick; in particular, the Wasson and Seminole fields have as much as 300 feet in the interval with OOIP numbers rivaling the main pay zone.  The oil recovery concept can be most simply described as using CO₂ injection as in a pattern-type CO₂ flood to recover oil from zones that may possess water saturations as high as 75% of the pore space.  The concept is analogous to CO₂ flooding water swept intervals in the main pay where water saturations have risen to 50-75% due to the waterflood.  For more information click: Stranded Oil in the Residual Oil Zone.  

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The Synergy of the Next Generation of Power Production and CO₂ EOR:

The global concern about rapidly expanding CO₂ emissions is beginning to create significant investment in carbon capture and CO₂ sequestration.  Effectively, the only place to sequester CO₂ and make money is in CO₂ flooding.  While the protocols for CO₂ flooding for sequestration purposes are still being worked out, many companies are seeing the inevitable desirability of coupling future sources of CO₂ with CO₂  The sources of CO₂ are many but the largest of which will likely become coal gasifiers   Coal gasification can be in the form of coal to electricity (analogous to the FutureGen concept – see http://www.futuregenalliance.org/), coal to liquids, or coal to poly-gen.  (ppt presentation  - coming soon)    Ethanol also has CO₂ as a byproduct as does hydrogen, many natural gas plants, and cement plants to name just a few additional sources.