Building a roadmap for enhanced oil recovery prefeasibility study
This paper describes an easy-to-use and fast-track roadmap for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) Prefeasibility Study including (1) screening of EOR suitable methods 2) estimating of additional recovery with mechanistic 3D models 3) evaluating preliminary economics (NPV) for field scale application 4) assessing the main uncertainties to reservoir, fluids and economical parameters. Oil-production from EOR projects represents currently about 4% of the worldwide production; this ratio is expected to increase significantly in the near future. EOR projects require in general important investments often in matured fields. It is therefore important for a decision maker to have a global view of the main technical and economical expectations and risks ahead of an EOR project decision. This roadmap helps identify ahead of an EOR project the main technical and economic challenges and provides a first Go/No-Go taking into account the main uncertainties and risks associated to this type of project. The main results of this roadmap are a set of pre-defined mechanistic 3D models with different reservoir geometries and suitable for 7 EOR methods (polymer, surfactant, SP flooding, steam injection, SAGD, in situ combustion, gases injection) and a simple but robust economic model providing a set of default technical and economical input values. Risk analysis is performed on these technical and economical results using either a deterministic or a probabilistic approach. The outcome of this roadmap is at field scale, for a given EOR method, an expected additional recovery factor and the corresponding discounted NPV with an uncertainty analysis on the main technical and economical parameters. Copyright 2012, Society of Petroleum Engineers.
