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Friday, August 19, 2022

A Reader's Perspective On Denbury And CO2 Injection -- August 19, 2022

The reader has long experience with the oil sector in North Dakota and Denbury specifically through family history in southwest North Dakota. The reader follows the oil sector closely in North Dakota and is a member of at least one oil-related organization in North Dakota. It appears he/she has no direct financial involvement with Denbury. 

EOR: enhanced oil recovery
CO2I: carbon dioxide injection

With regard to Denbury, a reader provides this insight (editing may have resulted in typographical and/or content errors): 

Denbury has converted 43 water EOR injection wells to CO2I mostly in Bowman county, since March, 2022. 
CO2 started injecting in April. 
The CO2 comes from the Wyoming Powder River Basin CO2 pipeline that’s now in Bowman county. They started the preparations and permitting with NDIC in 2019-2021.
The biggest change in the 24 wells filed that were reviewed [by the reader] occurred in 2022. The changes can be found in the well files of the CO2I wells.

Here’s an easy way to find these CO2I wells:

Find well page:
Select Denbury as operator: 
  • by section, township or range or field; or just operator.
Search the table view page with your browser: 
  • find on page function for CO2I well type - O = alpha O (not numeral 0).
Onee should see 43 CO2I or CO2 injection wells for Denbury. 
with "basic subscription" file reports are available. With premium you can click the well file for more information.

Neither Lynn Helms nor Justin Kringstad used Denbury in the operators highlighted doing EOR in the  June NARO conference. 
However, last December Lynn Helms said one operator was going to be using horizontal CO2 floods in Bowman; without naming the operator, it had to be Denbury. 
In June, 2022, state officials singled out CLR, Liberty, Kraken and a few others with projects [to include EOR]. 
From presentations at this year's NARO conference the reader sees EOR as a near- long-term bolt-in technology and we’ll see much more of it in ND. 
Stark County was the first major vertical EOR county -- a generation ago -- involving Conoco, Whiting and others and they got "amazing" results for years in the Lodgepole & Heath (Tyler) formations.

The reader saw no CO2I injection-related changes in production up until June, 2022. 
Typically it takes 1-3 years before thee build up / injection shows results, but things may be different with horizontal drilling and prior fracking. So far, it appears CO2I has been limited to vertical wells in North Dakota [needs to be confirmed; there could exceptions, and there could be test projects of a limited scale]. 
The reader suggests significant CAPEX was required by Denbury to convert 43 well bores from water to CO2 gas due to different approaches in the well bore.

The reader was surprised by the announcement of a potential Denbury sale, saying that Denbury has produced a lot of petroleum in the Red River Cedar Creek area, in southwest North Dakota.

2 comments:

  1. I wonder if CO2 injection will catch on due to the possibility of it mixing with water which could create carbonic acid. Which over time is very hard on tubulars. Mainly production tubulars. The Turner formation in the powder has CO2 in it and when frac is completed and turned over to production the tubing will have to be changed more frequently than say a Bakken/3F wells. Keeping LOE numbers low is what they are preaching now. Just my 2 cents. Enjoy you blog keep up the great work.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you for your kind words regarding the blog.

      That's very interesting about carbonic acid. Wouldn't that be the height of irony if Denbury realized the problem and realized they had a (relatively) unsolvable problem and that's why they are are considering options (like being sold) for their company. Well, we'll see.

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