Limited assets deter smaller independents from tertiary projects

Typically, with today's production technology, primary plus secondary (waterflood) - 66% of the oil remains in the reservoir. The tertiary oil is locked in the microscopic reservoir rock pore spaces by high viscosity, and/or high interfacial tension between the subterranean water and oil globule, and/or severe reservoir heterogeneity. At the average petroleum rate values for the 1975 to 1979 time period, the time to exhaustion of the proved reserves is 30 divided by 1.6 or 19 years. During 1980, due to the increasing cost of petroleum products, the estimated consumption rate decreased by approximately 10%, but this was accounted for by decreasing the import rate; therefore, the time to exhaustion of US proved reserves remains essentially unchanged. Enhanced oil recovery is described as one of the major alternate energy resources until 2000. Its attractive characteristics are discussed as infrastructure already in place; projected costs are relatively well known; soft technology; and location of the EOR target oil is known and its extent is large.