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Enhanced oil recovery (abbreviated EOR), also called tertiary recovery, is the extraction of crude oil from an oil field that cannot be extracted otherwise. Whereas primary and secondary recovery techniques rely on the pressure differential between the surface and the underground well, enhanced oil recovery functions by altering the physical or ...
Enhanced, or tertiary oil recovery methods, further increase mobility of the oil in order to increase extraction. Thermally enhanced oil recovery methods (TEOR) are tertiary recovery techniques that heat the oil, reducing its viscosity and making it easier to extract.
Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) is a biological-based technology involving the manipulation of functions or structures within microbial environments present in oil reservoirs. The primary objective of MEOR is to improve the extraction of oil confined within porous media, while boosting economic benefits.
Finally, the hot oil is pumped out of the well for a period of weeks or months. Once the production rate falls off, the well is put through another cycle of injection, soak and production. This process is repeated until the cost of injecting steam becomes higher than the money made from producing oil. [3]
In some cases, carbon dioxide (CO 2) flooding may be an ideal tertiary recovery method to recover more of the recoverable oil than could be produced using secondary oil recovery methods. Because of its special properties, CO 2 improves oil recovery by lowering interfacial tension , swelling the oil, reducing viscosity of the oil, and by ...
Oil recovery involves three stages of extraction: primary, secondary and tertiary. Since mobility is a ratio of effective permeability and phase viscosity, the productivity of a well is directly proportional to the product of layer thickness of the reservoir rock and mobility. [15] [16]
Petroleum refinery in Anacortes, Washington, United States. Petroleum refining processes are the chemical engineering processes and other facilities used in petroleum refineries (also referred to as oil refineries) to transform crude oil into useful products such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), gasoline or petrol, kerosene, jet fuel, diesel oil and fuel oils.
In recent years, enhanced oil recovery techniques – most notably multi-stage drilling and hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") – have moved to the forefront of the industry as this new technology plays a crucial and controversial role in new methods of oil extraction. [38]