Water Flooding
assume that this has been folded in the middle, so that it now has trapped oil within all the pores of the rock
assuming that I have a layer of rock that is 300 ft thick, five miles wide and thirty miles long , and it has a porosity of 20% .
So first let's do a bit of arithmetic :
300 x 5 x 5280 x 30 x 5280 = 1,254,528,000,000 cu.ft.
At 20% porosity, this means that some 250,905,600,000 cu. ft. are not rock, and in this case are going to be full of oil.
This is equivalent to 44,685,092,571 barrels of oil.
If the oil is light , and the rock properties allow oil to flow easily through the cracks,
Then ,we can recover up to 50% of oil.
So , URR=22.5 billion barrels.
Firstly,we’ll drill vertical wells one quarter of a mile apart.
The total recoverable oil for each well is roughly 10 million barrels
After some years (say;five years) we notice that the volume coming out of the well is not as much as it used to be .
If we pump water into the ground under the oil well, then the water will fill the holes left as the oil leaves, and we can keep the pressure in the oil up, and the oil flow will not drop as fast.
Limits to Water Flooding:
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