Research partnerships like the one between ThermoFisher Scientific and University of Wyoming’s Center of Innovation for Flow Through Porous Media aren’t the only ones circling the wagon when it comes to unlocking the secrets of enhanced oil recovery in America’s shale plays.
From the Bakken Formation in North Dakota to the Eagle Ford formation and Permian Basin in Texas to Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, oil wells have typically only given up a miserly 10 to 15% of the oil and gas resource that is actually in the ground. The remaining 85% remains trapped in tight rock, seemingly impossible to recover.
Cracking the code on that has long been seen by the oil and gas industry as key to extending the life of existing wells and dramatically improving the economics for a barrel of oil or gas.
A number of companies have been working on the problem with an eye on entering Wyoming. Some are relatively new, such as Shale Ingenuity, headed by Robert Downey, a petroleum engineer who will be presenting to oil and gas companies in January through Wyoming’s Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute. He hopes to interest Wyoming oil and gas producers in giving his process a try, after what he described as a “smashing success” on a test well in south Texas.
Another company that’s been around a while longer and has already had quite successful test runs in the Bakken and other major oil and gas plays, will be coming soon to Wyoming with a unique biological product that has been shown a long-term bump averaging 30% boosts to production for the older oil and gas wells where it’s been tested.
The biological agent is a surfactant created by fermenting canola oil, creating a tiny, 1.2 nanometer long molecule — smaller even than a strand of DNA, which is itself a mere 2.3 nanometers thick.
Surfactants are a class of chemicals that reduce friction and help loosen up molecules in liquid environments. A common and well-known example of a surfactant would be soap. Soap molecules have a water-loving end, and a water-hating end. The water hating or hydrophobic end of the molecule is repelled by water but attracted to the dirt, kind of like a magnet.
The water loving or hydrophyllic end, meanwhile, is attracted to the water and repelled by the dirt.
Thus surrounded, the dirt molecules can then no longer easily hold onto the surface. They are being lifted off the surface, so that it becomes easier to simply scrub and wash the dirt away.
“(Our biosurfactant) is super tiny,” Locus Bio-Energy Vice President of Technology Megan R. Pearl told Cowboy State Daily. “So, it’s orders of magnitude smaller than a lot of other (enhanced oil recovery) chemistries on the market.
Organic Likes Organic
The small size of Locus Bio-Energy’s surfactant molecule is just one factor that helps it penetrate not only the “gunk” that can build up in a well-bore over time, interfering with production, but also the tiny pores of tight rocks themselves.
“It can move faster and further in the same amount of time just because it’s smaller,” Pearl said. “It can physically fit into smaller space or fractures or pores than the big bulky molecules just physically can’t get into.”
Apart from its small size though, there is another reason Pearl believes the bio-surfactant Locus Bio-Energy makes is so successful.
The biosurfactant is an organic molecule, and so is oil and gas.
Oil and natural gas were both formed from dead or dying plants and animal material millions of years ago. Over time, and only under the right pressure and temperature conditions, only about 1% of the earth’s organic matter deposits have been transformed into the oil and gas deposits that are today mined for fuel and other industrial applications.
“I’m a spectroscopist by training,” Pearl said. “And we always had this phrase that like detects like. So, if you’re looking for, let’s say blood. That was one thing I did was build instruments to look for blood in crime scenes. So, if you’re looking for blood somewhere you have to have a filter that also looks like blood so it can see the blood. So, this is a kind of similar idea.
Not One And Done
A lot of enhanced oil recovery treatments end up being too short-lived to be of economic value. There will be a small, short-lived burst to production, but it doesn’t last long enough to pay for the treatment.
But Locus Bio-Energy’s surfactant is proving to have unusual longevity in field tests. It also doesn’t require any special equipment to get the material where it needs to be. It can simply be placed with a hydraulic fraturing or rig pump using a huff and puff technique. These two factors have made the process more economical than some of the options out there, Pearl said.
“We have a couple of case studies where we’ve been monitoring the production for three years where we’ve been able to increase the production, and at the three-year mark it’s still 30% higher,” Pearl said.
And those successes are being seen across multiple plays.
“We have used these products across almost all of North America and we are seeing excellent performance,” Pearl said. “So, the bio-surfactant portion, because it’s so complex also provides really robust performance as the environment you’re deploying it in changes. Obviously, we’re not always going to perform 100% but we haven’t seen where we’ve completely failed across the U.S.”
The company has already been assessing test samples from Wyoming oil fields, and a field test is planned sometime next year, probably in the first quarter of the year, for one of its oil and gas producers that also has wells in California, where Pearl said the process has also been used with great success.
“The initial results so far are very promising with our first customer that we’re hoping is going to bring us into Wyoming,” Pearl said. “It’s probably not going to happen this year, since we have two months left, but I’m hopeful that it’s Q1 of next year. We’ve just received another round of oils and waters to assess.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
