San Joaquin Basin

Solar enhanced oil recovery, or solar EOR, is a form of thermal enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a technique applied by oil producers to extract more oil from maturing oil fields. Solar EOR uses CSP to use the sun's energy to heat water and generate steam. The steam is injected into an oil reservoir to reduce the viscosity, or thin, heavy crude thus facilitating its flow to the surface. Thermal recovery processes, also known as steam injection, have traditionally burned natural gas to produce steam. Solar EOR is proving to be a viable alternative to gas-fired steam production for the oil industry.

However, other technologies can often be employed to investigate properties of the earth that correlate better with the properties of interest. If the images from these technologies can be provided at appropriate resolution, and if the knowledge required for interpretation and wise application of these technologies is available within the industry, they should be used. For example, electrical methods are extremely sensitive to variations in saturation, yet surface-based methods provide very poor resolution. Reservoir compaction can be directly observed from surface deformation, and pore-volume or gas-saturation changes can be detected from changes in the gravitational field. Dramatic examples of surface deformation induced by reservoir compaction have been provided by releveling studies (involving repeated high-accuracy surveying) and satellite-based interferometry.

Geological effects can impact the design and successful completion of oil, gas, and geothermal wells. Understanding the stresses and pore pressures within the subsurface are important to development of a geomechanical model that can guide well design as part of an integrated process to minimize cost and maximize safety. The normals to the three orthogonal planes define a Cartesian coordinate system (x1, x2, and x3). The stress tensor has nine components, each of which has an orientation and a magnitude (see Figure 1.a). Three of these components are normal stresses, in which the force is applied perpendicular to the plane (e.g., S11 is the stress component acting normal to a plane perpendicular to the x1-axis); the other six are shear stresses, in which the force is applied along the plane in a particular direction (e.g., S12 is the force acting in the x2-direction along a plane perpendicular to the x1-axis).

While always an implicit goal in steamflood processes, overall process heat management became a topic in the literature in the mid-1980s. The growth of the discipline has closely followed the development of the personal computer and computer applications. Heat management consists of data gathering, data monitoring and adjustments to the process as discussed in this page. Figure 1[1] is a graphical representation of the major components of a heat balance that must be performed to properly manage a steamflood process. Ziegler et al.[2] published a very good summary of a method of implementing the principle.

For any steamflood process, no matter how efficient, the major cost is always that of generating the process steam.

Designing a successful steamflooding project requires good candidate selection and an excellent understanding of the mechanisms by which recovery is enhanced. Screening criteria for identification of steamflood candidates have been published for many years. Table 1 shows the screening guides from five different sources.[1][2][3][4][5] It is obvious from Table 1 that there is a finite envelope of properties that define successful candidates. However, within that envelope there is a relatively wide spread of values for the indicators.

In-situ combustion is the oldest thermal recovery technique. It has been used for more than nine decades with many economically successful projects. In-situ combustion is regarded as a high-risk process by many, primarily because of the many failures of early field tests. Most of those failures came from the application of a good process to the wrong reservoirs or the poorest prospects. The objective of this page is to describe the potential of in-situ combustion as an economically viable oil recovery technique for a variety of reservoirs.

Horizontal wells are being employed in innovative ways in steam injection operations to permit commercial exploitation of reservoirs that are considered unfavorable for steam, such as very viscous oils and bitumen and heavy oil formations with bottomwater. This page discusses some of the ways in which horizontal wells have been used to enhance steamflooding. Numerous papers have explored steam injection using horizontal- vertical-well combinations by use of scaled physical models or numerical simulators. For example, Chang, Farouq Ali, and George[1] used scaled models to study five-spot steamfloods, finding that for their experimental conditions, a horizontal steam injector and a horizontal producer yielded the highest recovery. Figure 1 shows a comparison of oil recoveries for various combinations of horizontal and vertical wells and for four different cases: homogeneous formation, 10% bottomwater (% of oil zone thickness), 50% bottomwater, and homogeneous formation with 10% pore volume solvent injection before steam.

Although conformance-improvement gel treatments have existed for a number of decades, their widespread use has only begun to emerge. Early oilfield gels tended to be stable and function well during testing and evaluation in the laboratory, but failed to be stable and to function downhole as intended because they lacked robust chemistries. Also, because of a lack of modern technology, many reservoir and flooding conformance problems were not understood, correctly depicted, or properly diagnosed. In addition, numerous individuals and organizations tended to make excessive claims about what early oilfield gel technologies could and would do. The success rate of these gel treatments was low and conducting such treatments was considered high risk. As a result, conformance-improvement gel technologies developed a somewhat bad reputation in the industry. Only recently has this reputation begun to improve. The information presented in this chapter can help petroleum engineers evaluate oilfield conformance gels and their field application on the basis of well-founded-scientific, sound-engineering, and field-performance merits.

The most common method used to enhance oil production over primary rates is water injection, commonly referred to as secondary oil recovery. Common practice in the industry is to refer to all other methods as tertiary enhanced oil recovery. According to Prats,[1] thermal enhanced oil recovery (TEOR) is a family of tertiary processes defined as "any process in which heat is introduced intentionally into a subsurface accumulation of organic compounds for the purpose of recovering fuels through wells." This article provides an introduction to the mechanisms by which steam can enhance oil recovery. The most common vehicle used to inject heat is saturated steam.