What we’re doing here is we’re going to demonstrate the origin of the predominant type of residual oil zone in the Permian Basin. This is our source for the next generation of CO2 EOR production for oil. What we’ve got is a cross-section that we have adopted here in the Permian Basin. This would be west to east cross-section showing the layers of geology that run all the way from modern-day sediments through the cretaceous down to the Permian, from which the basin is named and down into the older Paleozoic to the basement.  

We’ve got over 200,000 wells that have penetrated this geology, so we know it very well. We are trying to recreate the tectonic events that have formed the basin and then altered the basin, including the original mega trap of oil in the San Andres formation of the Permian age. We have an animation for you here that tends to recreate the formation of the Permian basin and shows the original oil trap that was formed in the San Andres formation, and then we’re going to animate how part of that mega trap was swept out by mother nature. The way it was in the geologic past is not how it is in the present and so what we try to do with the animation is recreate that for you.

This our idealized cross-section showing the basin and its early tectonic stage in the early Permian time; we cut out a section of that because we’re going to concentrate on that in the first part of this animation. On the right of that is the central basin platform, which basically divided the Permian Basin into two regions.  The west was the Delaware Basin region, on the east was a Midland Basin region, and was separated by this platform of carbonate rock, limestones and ultimately become mostly dolomites, calcium magnesium carbonates. Our reservoirs, which we’ve targeted for many years, are the San Andres formation, which lies in the middle to late Permian time. 

Let’s look at that cutout section of our animation. You see this central basin platform on the right and the Delaware Basin on the left, and as you can see, as the subsidence is occurring, the central basin platform continues to grow upwards near the water surface, and the basin to the left is filling in. These fine-grain sediments we’re exploiting today with shale production, and then it’s covered up by the cretaceous rock 2,000ft deep in many places. Then we’re going to move out to the west, and we’re going to see forming of the mountains in New Mexico. In the animation, you see the outcrop of the San Andres formation that occurs in the area west and north of Roswell, New Mexico, and west and north of Carlsbad and Artesia, New Mexico. There, the water is meteoric in origin, coming from the atmosphere and comes into the casted outcrop of the San Andres formation and then begins to move down deep into the modern Permian Basin and sweep into the San Andres and into this mega trap that’s on the central basin platform. 

The black represents the large-scale or mega entrapment of oil, and then the water below it is the aquifer that the San Andres formation has. You can see we’re changing that. We’ve got a big section of the former trap that’s now being swept of oil from left to right and moving out of the basin. That region then becomes what we call residual oil zone or ROZ, and that is mother nature’s waterflood.

We are now going after that much like we’ve gone after our waterfloods, and we’re going after the oil left behind. We’re doing that now with 12 projects, and we’re successfully producing oil from the residual zone in the San Andres formation. We think that this is the only place in the world that that’s occurring, but we know there are other places in the world that these ROZs exist.

Contact Melzer Consulting at (432) 682-7664 or fill out our contact form for more information.