Strategic Studies of ROZs in the Permian Basin
Using Next Generation” CO2 EOR Technologies to Optimize the Residual Oil Zone CO2 Flood at the Goldsmith-Landreth Unit, Ector County, Texas, U.S. DOE Project, Award # DE-0005889, Coauthor with Trentham, R.C., Mr. Vello Kuuskraa, V. & Koperna, G. (2016) , U.S. Dept of Energy Report, Jun 2015
DOE Next Generation CO2 EOR Project
The significance of understanding the origins and distribution of Permian Basin ROZ resources is of high interest but is of pure academic importance unless the resource is commercially viable. The problem is that the commerciality is a very guarded subject as most of the on-going work on CO2 flooding the ROZs is local specific work, private, and not available to the public.
For those reasons, an operator was needed that had interests in making their ROZ project available to a broad audience. Legado Resources of The Woodlands with their Goldsmith Landreth San Andres project was such a company. The DOE solicitation for Next Generation EOR came at a perfect time so the Team decided to put together the Next Gen proposal to DOE.
The project has just been awarded and will get involved in the on-going CO2 EOR project work that Legado is planning to conduct. They started with a ROZ only dedicated 4-pattern pilot and are now moving to advance flooding to a commingle ROZ + MPZ, larger project through 2011 and beyond. The exciting feature of this project and the work that will become part of it through the DOE cost sharing will be the comparisons that can be made about the ROZ and MPZ payzones, their oil response to CO2 injection, and perhaps some next generation operational techniques that can be applied during the next two years.
In summary, the DOE project is all about a case history of reservoir response to CO2 in both the MPZ and ROZ intervals at the Goldsmith Landreth Unit and will allow comparisons and extrapolation to the wealth of data on MPZ in multiple fields to the ROZ resources.