Squeeze That Sponge

Nearly two-thirds of crude still gets left in the ground. With enhanced oil recovery, companies are determined to lower that number.

Often stymied in their quest for new crude, Western oil companies are squeezing more out of the reserves they already have.

Despite the engineering advances of the past century, nearly two-thirds of crude still gets left in the ground. So oil companies are raising the ante, investing billions of dollars in cutting-edge technology to increase the amount of crude they can tap.

The potential rewards are huge: Raising the average recovery rate world-wide to 50% from 35% would boost the world’s recoverable oil by about 1.2 trillion barrels — equal to the whole of today’s proven reserves, the International Energy Agency says.

“It’s the prize for the next half-century,” says Howard Mayson, vice president for technology at British oil giant BP PLC, which relies heavily on enhanced-recovery methods. Among the processes BP uses: flooding reservoirs with polymers that expand like popcorn when they come into contact with hot rocks, thus flushing more oil out of difficult-to-reach nooks.

… The benefits of enhanced recovery are cited regularly in the debate about how much oil is left to pump. “Peak oil” theorists believe the world’s oil and gas supplies are fast running out. Champions of enhanced recovery, by contrast, say this isn’t so, and point to steady upward revisions in estimates of the world’s recoverable hydrocarbon reserves as the industry invents new ways to pump hard-to-get-at oil.

Wall Street Journal