Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques can significantly extend global oil reserves once oil prices are high enough to make these techniques economic. Given a broad consensus that we have entered a period of supply constraints, operators can at last plan on the assumption that the oil price is likely to remain relatively high. This, coupled with the realization that new giant fields are becoming increasingly difficult to find, is creating the conditions for extensive deployment of EOR. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the nature, status and prospects for EOR technologies. It explains why the average oil recovery factor worldwide is only between 20% and 40%, describes the factors that contribute to these low recoveries and indicates which of those factors EOR techniques can affect. The paper then summarizes the breadth of EOR processes, the history of their application and their current status. It introduces two new EOR technologies that are beginning to be deployed and which look set to enter mainstream application. Examples of existing EOR projects in the mature oil province of the North Sea are discussed. It concludes by summarizing the future opportunities for the development and deployment of EOR.

Low-salinity enhanced oil recovery (EOR) effects have for a long time been associated with sandstone reservoirs containing clay minerals. Recently, a laboratory study showing low-salinity EOR effects from composite carbonate core material was reported. In the present paper, the results of oil recovery by low-salinity water flooding from core material sampled from the aqueous zone of a limestone reservoir are reported. Tertiary low-salinity effects, 2−5% of original oil in place (OOIP), were observed by first flooding the cores with high-saline formation water (208 940 ppm) and then with 100× diluted formation water or 10× diluted Gulf seawater at 110°C. It was verified by flooding the core material with distilled water that the core samples contained small amounts of anhydrite, CaSO 4 (s). The oil recovery was tested under forced displacement using different injection brines and oils with different acid numbers, 0.08, 0.34, and 0.70 mg of KOH/g. The low-salinity effect depended upon mixed wet conditions, and the effect increased as the acid number of the oil increased. No low-salinity effect was observed using a chalk core free from anhydrite. The chemical mechanism for the low-salinity effect is discussed, and in principle, it is similar to the wettability modification taking place by seawater described previously. In field developments, the oil reservoir is normally flooded with the most available water source. For offshore reservoirs, this means seawater or modified seawater. Thus, a relevant question addressed in this paper is can diluted seawater act as a low-saline EOR fluid after a secondary flood with seawater? Previous experiments have shown that both spontaneous imbibition and forced displacement tests using chalk cores, which were free from sulfate, did not show a low-salinity EOR effect when exposed to diluted seawater. This paper shows that, if anhydrite is present in the rock formation, diluted seawater or diluted produced water can act as an EOR injectant to improve recovery over that achieved with high-salinity brines. ■ INTRODUCTIONLarge carbonate oil reservoirs, in both the North Sea and the Middle East, are today flooded with seawater to achieve sufficient recovery to justify the substantial development costs. Seawater is used to maintain reservoir pressure and sweep oil to the producing wells. Historically, microscopic displacement efficiency has not been routinely optimized in the development stage. It is well-documented in the literature that laboratory studies show that seawater can modify the wetting condition in a favorable way to increase the oil recovery from hightemperature oil reservoirs, T res > 70−80°C. 1−4 The chemical mechanism for the increase in water wetness using seawater has been discussed, and the sulfate in seawater appeared to act as a catalyst for desorbing carboxylic material from the carbonate surface. 4 Recently, it has been shown that seawater can be modified to even act as a "smarter" enhanced oil recovery (EOR) fluid than ordinary seawater: (1) Seawater depleted in ...

We present a technique for reconstructing the spatially dependent dynamics of a fluorescent contrast agent in turbid media. The dynamic behavior is described by linear and nonlinear parameters of a compartmental model or some other model with a deterministic functional form. The method extends our previous work in fluorescence optical diffusion tomography by parametrically reconstructing the time-dependent fluorescent yield. The reconstruction uses a Bayesian framework and parametric iterative coordinate descent optimization, which is closely related to Gauss-Seidel methods. We demonstrate the method with a simulation study.

For over 10 years research has been carried out on the impact of low salinity waterflooding on oil recovery. Data derived from corefloods, single well tests, and log-inject-log tests have shown that injecting low salinity water into an oil reservoir should result in a substantial increase in oil recovery in many cases. The results varied from 2 to 40% increases in waterflood efficiency depending upon the reservoir and composition of the brine.In 2005, a hydraulic unit was converted to inject low salinity brine into an Alaskan reservoir, by switching a single injection pad to low salinity water from high salinity produced water. An injector well and 2 close production wells were selected within a reasonably well constrained area. A surveillance programme was devised which included capturing produced water samples at regular intervals for ion analysis and the capturing of production data.Detailed analysis of the production data, and the chemical composition of the produced water, demonstrated an increase in oil production and provided direct field evidence of the effectiveness of LoSal™ at inter-well scales. Additionally, the response of the reservoir to low salinity water injection was confirmed by single well chemical tracer test.In parallel, laboratory studies have led to mechanistic understanding of LoSal™ in terms of multiple-component ionic exchange (MIE) between adsorbed crude oil components, cations in the insitu brine and clay mineral surfaces. The results clearly show that the enhanced oil production and associated water chemistry response was consistent with the MIE mechanism proposed.The oil production data have been modeled using an in-house developed modification to Landmark's VIP TM reservoir simulation package. An excellent match for the timing of the oil response was obtained which provides a good basis for predicting the result for large scale application of LoSal™ flooding.

Frequency-domain diffusion imaging uses the magnitude and phase of modulated light propagating through a highly scattering medium to reconstruct an image of the spatially dependent scattering or absorption coefficients in the medium. An inversion algorithm is formulated in a Bayesian framework and an efficient optimization technique is presented for calculating the maximum a posteriori image. In this framework the data are modeled as a complex Gaussian random vector with shot-noise statistics, and the unknown image is modeled as a generalized Gaussian Markov random field. The shot-noise statistics provide correct weighting for the measurement, and the generalized Gaussian Markov random field prior enhances the reconstruction quality and retains edges in the reconstruction. A localized relaxation algorithm, the iterativecoordinate-descent algorithm, is employed as a computationally efficient optimization technique. Numerical results for two-dimensional images show that the Bayesian framework with the new optimization scheme outperforms conventional approaches in both speed and reconstruction quality.