EOR: Next Frontier for Unconventional Oil

Abstract

Guest editorial Recent headlines declared that the United States could end net oil imports by 2037. That finding, by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), is the agency’s first-ever projection—albeit under a high-resource scenario—of possible oil self-sufficiency for America. It is a stunning reversal of a trend. US net oil import dependency was at 60% as recently as 2005 and thought to be headed to 70% within a decade. Instead, today it is about 33% and dropping. Many of my colleagues in the oil and gas industry and I have long believed that achieving such a milestone was possible, if only the right combination of technology, economics, and political will could come together. We understood the scope of the vast untapped hydrocarbon bounty in the US, recognizing that half of its identified oil endowment of nearly three-quarters of a trillion barrels of oil is untapped. That is why the US leads the world in the application of improved oil recovery (IOR) and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies. Much of the credit for the surge in US oil production goes to the advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing applied to massive shale and other tight oil rock formations. Indeed, even under the EIA’s reference case, shown in Fig. 1, tight oil sustains overall US production for many years at a level nearly twice what expectations were just a decade ago. Both technologies essentially qualify as IOR, bolstering the claim that, in fact, IOR is responsible for America’s energy revolution.