Chemical Process for Improved Oil Recovery From Bakken Shale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract There is a new chemical improved oil recovery (IOR) process for Bakken reservoirs. In this concept a custom surfactant agent may be incorporated into standard hydraulic fracturing treatments for the Bakken to increase oil recovery. These are reservoirs from the Late Devonian to Early Mississippian age occupying about 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2) of the subsurface of the Williston Basin, covering parts of Montana, North Dakota, and Saskatchewan. The rock formation consists of three members: Lower shale, Middle dolostone/siltstone, and Upper shale. The shales were deposited in relatively deep marine conditions, and the dolostone/siltstone was deposited as a coastal carbonate during a time of shallower water. The Middle member is the principal oil reservoir, roughly two miles (3.2 km) below the surface. Both the Lower and Upper members are organic-rich marine shales. The oil in place in the Bakken shale play is very large, with an April 2008 USGS report estimating the amount of technically recoverable oil in the Bakken Formation at 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels. Production from the Bakken has been limited in the past, but now has become a very active area of development with the widespread advent of drilling horizontal wells and large-volume hydraulic fracturing treatments. One key to the economic production rates of oil from these formations is to create an extensive well-connected fracture system. Laboratory experiments demonstrate that specialized surfactant formulations will interact with this mixed- to oil-wet low permeability Middle member to produce more oil. Specifically, including such a surfactant chemical formulation in an aqueous phase (e.g. hydraulic fracturing fluids) will promote the spontaneous imbibition of this fluid into the tight matrix and microfractures containing high oil saturation. This promotes expulsion of oil otherwise trapped to migrate into the fracture system and then be produced into the wellbore. Thus including an appropriate surfactant in frac fluids or in other aqueous-based treatment fluids can produce additional oil.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".