Extensive experience in many different parts of the world has confirmed the prediction that while conventional oil production still delivers over 90% of the world’s demand, primary and secondary recovery techniques leave at least 50% of oil reserves in the reservoir as unrecoverable.
A detailed analysis prepared by Ivan Sandrea (StatoilHydro) and Rafael Sandrea (IPC) published in 2007 by Oil & Gas Journal concludes that the global average recovery rate is no better than 22%.
Since the application of secondary recovery techniques like natural gas and water injection became the norm in the late 1960s the focus was normally on larger fields. This implies that the majority of medium and smaller fields, from which 50% of the world’s cumulative production was extracted, were abandoned after the primary phase of recovery – for whatever reason – without any pressure maintenance, therefore leaving most of the oil reserves in the ground.
It is therefore quite obvious that there are abundant opportunities to employ EOR and that economics driven mainly by the market price for crude oil will determine the rate of adoption in future. The general industry consensus accepts that the global total of Original-Oil-In-Place (OOIP) is close to 12 trillion barrels.
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