Air Injection and Waterflood Performance Comparison of Two Adjacent Units in Buffalo Field: Technical Analysis
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Buffalo Field covers a large area on the southwestern flank of the Williston Basin, in the northwest corner of South Dakota. In 1987, 8440 acres of the field were divided into two units to initiate improved oil recovery (IOR) operations with two different methods: air injection and waterflooding. After collecting 18 years of production history a comparison has been made between the two projects to determine the relative success of both units. This paper addresses the technical performance of both projects in terms of incremental oil recovery, estimated ultimate recovery and incremental recovery per volumes of fluid injected. Ultimate primary recovery was estimated using conventional decline curve analysis on individual wells. Ultimate recovery was estimated by extrapolation of the current performance of the units assuming the same actual development scheme and operating strategies. Technical advantages and limitations of both IOR methods as applied in this field are also discussed. Throughout the years, the West Buffalo Red River Unit (WBRRU) under air injection has shown a significantly superior performance over its "twin" West Buffalo "B" Red River Unit (WBBRRU) being waterflooded. Quicker production response to injection, higher production rates and higher incremental recovery are some of the advantages shown by air injection as an IOR method in this field. This case study clearly shows the technical viability of air injection as an efficient method of improved oil recovery particularly in deep, high pressure, low permeability reservoirs where water injectivity is limited and other recovery processes become uneconomic. The myth of air injection as a high risk, unsuccessful operation is shown to be invalid; and instead, it proves to be a feasible way to unlock oil accumulations.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 it