Idle Rambling On Porosity, Permeability -- July 30, 2019

This is way beyond my core competency. This is way beyond my headlights.

I have no formal education in fluid movement, viscosity, etc.

What follows is simply my two cents worth in line with the "purpose" of the the blog.

This has to do with permeability and porosity, two concepts that really, really confuse me.

I'm trying to connect the dots:

• ever-increasing natural gas production in the Bakken, a crude oil play, not a natural gas play
• better and better oil wells being reported (in terms of oil production)
• the observation that there seems to be a lot of produced water in these new wells

A reader recently send me this comment in reply to this post:

EOG made an early announcement in 2008 on EOR in the Bakken and afterwards buried it. (Wouldn't give a followup, but just never implemented it.) Recently they have supposedly been doing field gas EOR in parts of the EF. Even that has not really spread to other operators or all of their acreage. And in general, things that work spread.

So that's nice that Liberty is still hacking away at it. But I would go super skeptical on the "this could be huge". If it's moving to huge-dom, you'll know it because multiple operators start doing it and it becomes routine, not a test. 

The reader has a very good point: the "EOR/EOG announcement was made two years ago (2017) and then seemed to disappear. Two years later, maybe a "test."

I have a lot of thoughts on that but I will it stand.

Other very credible sources are suggesting that the size of molecules is the important story here.

I used to have great difficulty correlating size of molecules with porosity, permeability.

But I'm coming around.

Methane (one carbon, four hydrogens, essentially the diameter of one atom, carbon).

H2O: (one oxygen, two hydrogens, esseentially the diameter of one atom, oxygen).

One oxygen atom has an atomic radius of 60 picometers, think water.

One carbon atom has an atomic radius of 170 picometers, think methane, natural gas.

Ethane is twice the size of CH4 -- two carbon atoms -- and so much ethane is being produced that it is often "rejected."

Propane: 3 carbon atoms.

Butane: 4 carbon atoms.

Pentane: 5

Crude oil: multiple multi-carbon molecules.

Things starting to make sense.

Not ready for prime time. Just some idle rambling. The bottom line: Bakken wells -- especially those that are re-fracked or affected by neighboring fracked wells are showing significantly increased amounts of small-molecule products, like methane and water.