Meantime, the Earth is hotter now than during three-quarters of the 11,300 years since the most recent ice age, according to researchers at Harvard and Oregon State universities. By 2020, U.S. oil output may surpass that of Saudi Arabia, the world’s top producer, the Paris-based International Energy Agency says.
Drillers say they can hasten America’s petroleum revival with CO2 EOR, a technique first used in the 1970s to refresh flagging wells.
In the mid-1990s, Hess Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp. began using carbon dioxide in so-called residual oil zones, areas previously rejected because the petroleum was mixed with too much water.
Since then, mapping and other technologies for steering CO2 toward productive reservoirs have improved, says Steve Melzer, who has run CO2 EOR conferences in Midland, Texas, for 18 years. The enhancements helped convince Roosevelt, who aims to be the first person to drill residual oil in a virgin field where there’s no network of existing wells.
Roosevelt’s claim that roughly 1.8 billion barrels are trapped below his parcel is accurate, says Melzer, whose consulting firm studied and verified it. Ryder Scott Co., a Houston firm that oil companies hire to independently evaluate petroleum reserves data they file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, estimates Roosevelt has a 90% probability of recovering 437 million barrels or more, spokesman Mike Wysatta says.
Texas Rozapolis
Melzer has no doubts about the oil. He calls west Texas residual oil zones, or ROZ in drilling lingo, the rozapolis because of their enormous potential. Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming are also rich in residual oil, says Vello Kuuskraa, who helped develop wells near Fort Worth, Texas, in 1997 that showed the viability of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and unleashed U.S. fossil-fuel fever.
Unlike fracking, in which drillers blast water, sand and chemicals into wells to shatter shale and release oil and gas, CO2-enhanced drilling induces a chemical reaction that makes oil less sticky and helps it flow from microscopic pores in the rock. CO2 costs about $35 per metric ton in west Texas, and drillers recycle it as many times as possible to dislodge more oil.
Such drilling has the potential to unlock 100 billion barrels of recoverable U.S. reserves, says Kuuskraa, president of Advanced Resources International Inc. in Arlington, Va. U.S. reserves total 222.6 billion barrels this year, the EIA says.
About one-third of Kuuskraa’s projected increase, or 33 billion barrels, would come from residual zones, augmenting the bounty that fracking is recovering from shale rock.