Glenn R. McColpin | Forbes
Building on Drillinginfo posts about Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) earlier this year in these times of low commodity prices, I wanted to touch on the subject of EOR affordability and access for the operators who manage the hundreds of thousands of underappreciated stripper wells across the US.
The National Stripper Well Association (NWSA) states that there are an estimated 771,000 marginal wells in production. Combined they make up 11.3% of the US oil production and 8.3% of the US gas production. These wells are described as marginal because they are marginally economic to produce. The NWSA website states that in that last 10 years, over 131,000 of these oil wells and 48,000 gas wells have been plugged and abandoned. Many of these wells are plugged without ever having undergone waterfloods or tertiary production so they are being abandoned with a significant % of the original oil still in place.