American Oil and Gas Reporter - February 2016 - 71

SpecialReport: Improved Oil Recovery
phaltenes out of the well, you perform a
huff-and-puff injection with the solvent
vapor and gas mixture after the cleaning
phase, which strips oil from the rock
matrix and increases formation pressure."
The biosolvent vapor reduces the oil's
viscosity and modifies its cloud point so
that paraffin formation is inhibited as oil
flows back through the pore space and
picks up the solvent, McColpin says. He
likens the system to a mobile EOR plant
through which any well in a field can be
treated on any schedule by pulling up the
truck and connecting to a casing valve.
Tubing and pumps can remain in the
hole for subsequent treatments-typically
three to six months after the initial treatment, he adds.
"In one, single-well treatment we may
inject 150 Mcf-250 Mcf of gas into the
rock with the solvent vapor, then we shut
the well in and let it soak for three to five
days to allow the gas to move away from
the wellbore," McColpin details. "The
pressure will drop from 500 to maybe 60
psi in a couple days. When we put the
well back on the pump, the pressurized

nitrogen acts to bring the thinned and
treated oil back to the wellbore."
He adds that for heavy oil deposits,
Nitro-Dyne units can generate steam on
demand, which allows operators to put
more heat into the ground.
The cost for treating wells "is highly
competitive with hot oiling," according
to McColpin, but has the added benefit
of re-energizing the reservoir pressure,
which he says can increase production
rates significantly.
"By delivering the plant-based treatment solvent/surfactant as a low-viscosity
vapor, SURGITECH feels it achieves
more uniform distribution, which results
in dramatically lower treatment costs versus traditional liquid applications," he
says.
McColpin says SURGITECH is eyeing
potential pilot projects in one marginal
well corridor extending from Kentucky
to New York and another running from
Texas to Wyoming, adding that the treatment has worked well in a variety of formation types. He says the enhancement
process has been applied to more than

ARTICLE

1,000 wells over the past five years.
Subsurface Surveillance
Austin, Tx.-based Seismos Inc.'s KView™ CO2 EOR surveillance platform
gives tertiary recovery operators the advantage of assessing subsurface movement
of carbon dioxide and areas of unswept
oil in real time, thereby allowing them to
make adjustments, says CEO and founder
Panos Adamopoulos.
The system consists of a cloud-based
geophysical data processing platform connected to surface-installed, low-impact
emitters and sensors that generate images
of CO2 movement over time, he explains.
Because operators typically lack a costeffective, real-time solution for tracking
underground CO2 flow, Adamopoulos
says, as much as half of the gas can be
underutilized, resulting in potentially substantial volumes of unrecovered oil.
"The CO2 could be going in any direction," Adamopoulos comments. "Although
operators expect it to be going toward
producing wells, many times it isn't."
With deployment lead times of less

Improved Oil
Recovery

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FEBRUARY 2016 71
American Oil and Gas Reporter - February 2016

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