New technique both enhances oil recovery, sequesters carbon dioxide

摘要

A proposed recovery technique for oil extraction developed by a Perm State-led research team not only outperforms existing drilling and recovery techniques, but also has the potential to sequester more carbon dioxide in the process. The team estimated that companies using this new technique would greatly improve oil recovery rates. They developed a model that indicates that the process could extract between 78-90% of the oil in a reservoir over several decades. Existing drilling techniques in use today extract a maximum of 50-60% of the estimated total volume of oil before production, and on average, that number is closer to 35%. The model uses horizontal drilling, in which wells are drilled up to about 4,000 meters underground, parallel to the Earth's surface, through known oil reservoirs. This differs from vertical drilling techniques, in which wells run perpendicular to the Earth's surface.