Reservoir Characteristics of Devonian Cherts and Their Control on Oil Recovery: Dollarhide Field, West Texas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Approximately 70 million bbl of oil have been produced from the chert-dominated Thirtyone Formation at Dollarhide field. The Thirtyone Formation is Devonian in age and contains two reservoir intervals, an upper dolomite and a lower chert, separated by nonporous limestone. The chert reservoir contains approximately 83% of the original oil in place (OOIP) and consists of two different facies-laminated microporous chert and burrowed chert. The laminated microporous chert was apparently deposited as sponge spicule sands (grainstones) in channels and fans on the slope of the Tobosa basin. The burrowed chert facies was apparently deposited as burrowed mixtures of sponge spicules, siliceous mud, and carbonate mud in broad slope environments between fans and channels. Spicules are thought to be derived from disaggregation of siliceous sponges living on the slope. Early marine and/or meteoric diagenesis dissolved many sponge spicules and reprecipitated the silica as microcrystalline chalcedony and quartz, resulting in spicule-moldic porosity and microporosity in the originally siliceous strata. The burrowed chert underwent small-scale differential compaction that produced short, discontinuous fractures, 1-10 mm in length and 0.1-0.5 mm in width. Production from the field has been related to amounts and characteristics of the pore systems. The thickness of the porous chert ranges laterally from 0 to 80 ft (0-24 m), and pore volume (φh) ranges from 0 to 20 pore ft (0-6 pore m). The laminated microporous chert is very homogeneous and has high porosity (25-35%) and uniform permeability (5-30 md). Areas dominated by laminated microporous chert had moderate primary recovery (approximately 200,000 bbl of oil per well), excellent waterflood production (1-2.5 million bbl of oil per well), and poor 20-ac (8.1 ha) infill production (<20,000 bbl of oil per well). The burrowed chert has more heterogeneous porosity (5-30%) and permeability (<1-100 md). The dolomite also has heterogeneous pore networks that have porosities of 3-15% and measured permeabilities of less than 1-200 md. Wells having substantial amounts of porous dolomite and/or burrowed chert had moderate to good primary recovery (200,000-300,000 bbl of oil per well), moderate waterflood recovery (300,000-1,100,000 bbl of oil per well), and moderate 20-ac (8.1 ha) infill recovery (50,000-100,000 bbl of oil per well). Oil recovery from the CO2 flood is expected to average approximately 250,000 bbl per well, having slightly higher recovery (300,000 bbl) in areas that have thick laminated microporous chert and/or burrowed chert. Oil recovery from the homogeneous, laminated microporous chert during the CO2 flood is improved by large amounts of residual oil and good sweep efficiency but decreased by the previously efficient sweeping of original mobile oil by the waterflood. The CO2 recovery from the heterogeneous, burrowed chert is improved by significant amounts of unswept mobile oil but decreased by poorer sweep efficiency. As a field, primary recovery is estimated at 13% of OOIP, waterflood at 30% of OOIP, infill at 3.5% of OOIP, and CO2 flood at 11% of OOIP.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".