EORI Library
Find publications about Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR).

Cardinal Water Resistivities in Wyoming Basins Booklet

A reprint of Formation Water Resistivities originally compiled by Don Cardinal (1984) is now available on the EORI website. This publication is a valuable resource for establishing Rw values necessary for calculating oil and water saturations from wireline logs.

A reprint of Formation Water Resistivities originally compiled by Don Cardinal (1984) is now available on the EORI website. This publication is a valuable resource for establishing Rw values necessary for calculating oil and water saturations from wireline logs. Data are compiled by basin and include: well name and location, formation, depth, source of the water, Shut-in-Pressure, and measured water resistivity.

Polymer Flooding the Minnelusa in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming

Polymer-augmented waterflooding of the Minnelusa in Wyoming has proven to be a successful method for improving production in most cases compared to normal waterfloods. Polymer is a lowcost, low-risk option when considering a method for enhancing production of a particular field. Its primary function is to improve the mobility ratio of the injected water by increasing its viscosity, thereby improving the volumetric sweep and conformance within the reservoir.

Advantages of using polymer include: (1) low cost, (2) preventing early water breakthrough, (3) improving volumetric sweep and conformance, (4) increasing oilwater ratios, (5) mobilizing oil that would likely have been bypassed under normal waterflood conditions, (6) mitigating heterogeneous permeabilities within the reservoir, and (7) other enhanced oil recovery injection technologies can still be applied after the polymer flood. Most, but not all, Minnelusa fields examined exhibited improved recoveries using polymer compared to fields under conventional waterfloods. Uneconomical polymer floods can be caused by a variety of factors, chief of which is the failure to properly understand the internal architecture of the reservoir prior to initiating the flood.

EORI Economics Past & Present, TAB Briefing

Topics covered in this briefing:

  • Ongoing Operator & Vendor Support
  • WY Energy & Policy Insights
  • Wyoming CO2-EOR Potential & Impact
  • Impact of Electricity Costs on Oil/Gas Development
  • Proposed Benchmarking

The Future Economic Contribution of Wyoming's CO2-EOR Potential

After several decades of decline Wyoming’s oil production is now turning higher thanks to higher oil prices, the development of condensates, and investments in tertiary methods such as CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery (CO2-EOR). The present work brings together two prior pieces of research by integrating the economic impact model of Cook (2013a) with the scoping estimates of Wyoming’s CO2-EOR potential found in Cook (2013b). The hope is that discussing the potential economic contribution of CO2-EOR will help inform industry participants and policy makers for the further development of CO2 infrastructure in the state.