About Us

There is so much to think about in the realm of Enhanced Oil Recovery applied to the unconventional reservoir. In early 2011 I was the lead reservoir engineer for the Eagle Ford assets in South Texas, Mark Papa challenged me to explore the possibility of “Secondary Recovery” for the 30+ Billion barrels of Oil in Place. By early 2012 the first prototype was being field-tested, by 2014 multiple trials were initiated across different geologic/fluid settings. 

During 2020 I put together a team to apply first principles of our collected experience of the last 20 years to commercialize enhanced oil recovery (secondary recovery) for unconventional oil and gas condensate reservoirs. We started from a 30,000ft perspective and asked ourselves key questions about EOR, Unconventional Reservoirs and Economic parameters. Below is an excerpt from our thought space.

Conventional and unconventional reservoir systems differ in the following ways: sourcing, storage, and producing characteristics (gravity, buoyancy, diffusion, viscosity etc.). These differences imply that enhanced oil recovery processes cannot be directly or indirectly copied from one system to the other. So, one must investigate and understand the unconventional reservoir differences to derive the important parameters necessary to implementing an economically successful EOR program.  For instance, the Sourcing of Hydrocarbons in a conventional reservoir involves the migration of hydrocarbons and trapping of these hydrocarbons by a process of buoyance and capillary pressure. In unconventional systems the reservoir is the sourcing and storage of hydrocarbons, where parent organic matter exists in the presence of migrated hydrocarbons. These differences have significant implications for how to initiate and evolve EOR processes. We have observed hydrocarbon composition variations within oil windows of all oil plays, produced API gravity is not enough to understand how to approach subsurface EOR extraction of liquid hydrocarbons. Fluid selection for miscible flooding will be different for unconventional oils with similar producing API gravities. Since, most of the drainage in unconventional happens near fracture faces (natural and created) any unsuitable fluid injection can cause irreversible “damage” to the well productivity, so judicious methods need to be used in the selection of treatment fluid compositions.

We passionately believe over the last several months our team has developed the methods necessary to analyze and prescribe unique treatments by well by EOR cycle number. We have also designed an energy efficient, modular, very portable system. In many EOR cases we believe we can power our system with Solar/battery energy, supplemented with natural gas power generation. So incremental barrels from our process will have little to no incremental carbon footprint.

For 2021 and 2022 we are focusing our operations on the Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma unconventional and hybrid reservoirs.