RPSEA Green OilTM Technology
CO2-EOR is a very promising technique for recovering oil from abandoned small producer wells. However, many small producers cannot apply EOR technology due to high capital costs resulting from site remoteness, limited pipeline access, and long construction lead-times. To serve the small producer needs, Pioneer is developing a modular and truck-portable biomass-based steam reforming technology to create CO2 for EOR and H2 for electricity generation. The Pioneer technology will allow small producers to have access to EOR for domestic oil recovery in a timely, scalable, locally field deployable, and cost effective manner. The technology will also produce clean electrical power to offset producer capital and operating costs.
The Pioneer device is unique from other gasifiers in that it is tailored to produce clean, high pressure, high concentrations of CO2 for on-site well flooding, and H2 for electrical power for local or grid service. In parallel with this technology development effort, studies are being done to identify and characterize suitable fields for field testing the unit.
To date, Pioneer has designed, fabricated, and performance tested a fully automated 200,000 SCFD demonstrator (Figure 1). The performance of the device with respect to operating flow rate, pressure, and gas composition have been demonstrated, and is sufficient for meeting CO2-EOR operational requirements. Future plans include completing the scale-up to 1,000,000 CFD output followed by field testing.