The cost of a gas flood has almost evaporated.  It now costs only $1 of gas injection to push out $90 of oil.  With a potential benefit of increasing your reserve recovery by an order of magnitude, now is the time to be starting miscible floods.

If all the companies in Alberta injected low price gas into conventional oil reservoirs, Alberta’s recoverable reserves would increase by ten times.  Alberta could increase its conventional reserves by about 30 billion barrels. 

To put that in perspective, Alberta has produced 16 billion barrels of conventional oil in its entire history.  There’s more oil left to produce under miscible flooding than we have ever produced – in fact almost twice as much.

However, gas flooding has its own distinct challenges that are very different from water flooding.  Gas flooding issues include injectant gravity, minimum miscibility pressure, fingering, directional permeability, and sweep.

Unfortunately just injecting gas into an oil reservoir sometimes produces gas breakthrough immediately for three reasons: immiscibility, fingering, and directional permeability.

Gas flooding all its conventional oil pools would take only a very small portion of Alberta’s current gas production.  Only 1-3% of the daily gas supply is required to flood every single conventional pool.  Generally it takes about 500 scf to replace a barrel of oil in the reservoir.

But creating a well planned miscible flood can add huge reserves.  At least one miscibly flooded pool in Alberta has already recovered 57% of its OIP.  The ERCB’s conservative forecast of ultimate recovery for that pool is 63%!  Compare that to a 4% primary recovery for the pool.

Operators can even use gas floods where water is scarce.  Some pools in the province have very little natural water production. Currently, it is difficult to justify to the Alberta government using lake and river water to inject into the earth. Finding suitable water to use as injectant is difficult, particularly in the Drayton Valley and Drumheller areas.

Proven’s flood experts can help your company cash in on the wide gas/oil differential.  Let us show you how.

~Granger J. Low

The above map is a summary of all the resource applications submitted to the ERCB last month (May 2012). Those familiar with oil sands projects (SAGD) will notice several new applications in various oil sands-rich areas, while many new traditional projects have been applied for in the Pembina Cardium area near Central Alberta.

This information was gathered by AppIntel, which can easily collect and inform users of new applications within areas of interest. Proven uses this data to track trends and changes in the industry, as well as forecast potential changes at the board.

Contact Proven Reserves today to see how AppIntel could help you!

Granger J. Low is the president of Proven Reserves and principal engineer.

Granger was born and raised here in Calgary. He has a bachelor and master degree from the University of Calgary in petroleum engineering, and, in his 27 years working in the oil gas industry, has worked all over the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. At the beginning of his career, he worked four years in the field in Rainbow Lake. His work specialties include pressure transient analysis, reservoir exploitation, and petroleum economics.

Recently, Granger has been actively involved in perfecting reservoir engineering software solutions for commercial release, the first of which - AppIntel - allows users to easily search and study reservoir schemes from all over Alberta.

Granger enjoys serving in the community when he’s not at work. He has served as the CEO of a local charity, and is currently a scout leader with Scouts Canada. He also is a water ski enthusiast.

Thanks, Granger!