Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more oil in Texas … new technology is about to unlock an extremely shallow field that is brimming with heavy oil that has been impossible to recover--until now.
Many oil companies have spent many millions of dollars trying to unlock this gem, but expensive steam injections weren’t efficient enough to make it competitive or economic, even if they had succeeded.
While steam injections cost $50 per barrel, the new technology lifts the oil at under $10 per barrel—an astounding savings, even if oil prices crashed to lows not seen since the late 90s.
This dramatically reduced cost of extraction should send the Saudis back to the OPEC negotiating table in a panic.
But this is the story of Petroteq Energy - a small company with huge ambitions to become a driving force of a brand new chapter in the American oil revolution ...
The Texas Permian Basin has been producing oil for almost 100 years, but geological assessments show that even though billions of barrels have already come out of this sleeping giant, billions more are still waiting to be pumped.
Nowhere is this more immediately foreseeable than the Wardlaw oilfield.
This story starts 80 years ago on a huge tract of oil-rich land in the Permian Basin, the home of Spindletop, the historical gusher that everyone today associates with America’s oil beginnings.
Everyone from small private companies to the majors showed up on the scene at Wardlaw, pumping multi-millions of dollars into the field—to no avail. No oil in any significant quantity has been produced to date.
They didn’t have the right technology, and Wardlaw is a tough venue. There is no water, gas or any other drive mechanism in the zone, and formation pressure is abnormally low, while the oil is viscous.
The 130+ wells on the property have a history of extremely low production rates. Faced with these insurmountable challenges and having exhausted all known recovery methods, the operators suspended production in 2015. They ran out of money and economic incentives.
They left practically all the oil in the ground.
The operators were employing all known extraction technologies, from expensive steam injections costing a prohibitive $50 per barrel, to water flooding with surfactants to get the oil out of the ground. Nothing really worked.
Since oil prices crashed in late-2014 in the aftermath of the initial shale boom, nothing close to $50 per barrel makes sense. Oil riches become rags, and it was considered best to leave the oil in the ground.
But then came a small company with big technology, and a series of acquisitions and partnerships that would turn the rags back into riches at Wardlaw with a process that puts the extraction price at $10 per barrel or under. And visionary Petroteq was the force behind the decision to found Accord and acquire Wardlaw—against all odds.
Wardlaw is nothing if not rich. The 7,000-acre shallow field is bursting at the seams with heavy oil and proven reserves with estimated potential of over 100 million barrels of oil in place. Accord GR Energy has 130+ wells, and now they have the technology to do what no one else has been able to—get the oil out of the ground at a massive discount.
The future of oil extraction is no longer about brute force—it’s about clever persuasion.
These technologies are the next logical advancement in our determination to get more oil out of the ground. In this decade, first it was fracking—now it’s enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a branch that is expanding at breakneck speed.
The company behind the technology is Galex Energy Corporation, and this isn’t the company’s only innovation: They’ve developed multiple technologies to add a happy ending to any geological story. The process is called S-BTF (baric-thermal flow) and is custom designed to unlock Wardlaw’s oil riches.
The two key technologies incorporated into the S-BTF process are:
• SWEPT uses impulse waves to facilitate the recovery of fossil hydrocarbons by improving rock filtration and fluid properties, in-situ natural energy and flue migration forces. In other words, the future of unlocking our oil riches lies in the application of complicated engineering algorithms of the impact on surfaces and substances of impulse waves. The algorithms may be complicated, but the process itself is very simple—which makes it brilliantly economic: A SWEPT generator mounted on the wellhead generates waves. The waves travel downward, reaching a deflector and spreads out hundreds of meters (the wave parameters are determined by algorithms in advance based on the geological data of the specific location). The end result: Optimization of conditions for oil’s flow to the surface with a final steam-gas fraction to displace it from stubborn pores that we could never before budge.
• S-BRPT – Galex’s proprietary thermobaric process for recovery of oil, including extra heavy and degraded oil. SISG, the core technology used in the process, is a frontier technology for producing fossil hydrocarbons and resynthesizing them into marketable products. The process was initially custom developed for the Utah-based Asphalt Ridge tar sand property of Petroteq Energy, and was planned to be used by Bear Rock Petroleum, Inc. So, ‘BRPT’ stands for ‘Bear Rock Petroleum Technology’.
A number of other proprietary Galex technologies have been developed specifically for the Wardlaw field to be incorporated into and support the S-BTF process. Most of the technologies are now patented in the US and may be used outside of Wardlaw to recover degraded hydrocarbons from any energy-lacking, mostly shallow reservoir.
In September’ 2016, the Accord-Galex team made the first attempt to establish communication with the oil zone using key components of the S-BTF process. The attempt was successful. In February and May this year, the optimized method was tried again, first on old, and then on new wells.
The result exceeded expectations and proved the feasibility of commercial activation of the field using the S-BTF process. Randal Pruitt, a member of Accord’s Board of Directors and a former BP vice-president, after reviewing the results of those trials and recognizing the potential of the process, offered his own decoding of the acronym BTF: “Bigger Than Fracking”.
Accord Energy is making the most of SWEPT at Wardlaw. In February 2016, they tested the technology on a particularly rough extraction patch. In fact, they tested it in the most depleted area of the field, and the results were ground-breaking.
They set out to extract the seemingly impermeable oil buried deep in this matrix—the oil that makes up 90% of the field’s reserves. And they did: SWEPT increased the well rates from single gallons to greater than 10 barrels per day.
Now Accord is moving on to Phase 2, and they’re using S-BRPT—and history is in the making, and indeed it’s shaping up to be ‘bigger than fracking’.
As we close in on releasing the massive amounts of oil trapped in the tricky rock of Wardlaw, a series of very savvy relationships has led the way to minting the next oil barons—and it’s got nothing to do with the supermajors (yet).
Accord is all about capitalizing on the current oil market down-trend by acquiring sub-economic assets, improving their technical efficiency and increasing their value exponentially thanks to major tech advancements by its innovation nerve center - Galex.
The Wardlaw project is the first sizeable acquisition of Accord GR Energy. Petroteq Energy is the largest single shareholder in Accord, and it’s the brains behind Accord’s business decisions. It intends to consolidate forces with other Accord shareholders to create the most technically advanced and dynamically growing E&P company in the ever-changing crude oil producing industry.
Petroteq has a been a leader in small-cap innovation, bringing us the first clean oil sands extraction solution. And in the small-cap world, their advanced asset management expertise is hard to beat.
But where it gets even more interesting is this: Accord is the only E&P company that enjoys the full support of Galex with respect to the licensing of technologies, and the design and optimization of oil recovery and handling processes, such as SWEPT, S-BRPT and S-BTF. Not only can they extract the hundreds of millions of barrels from Wardlaw and other properties they own, but they can synergistically extend the process to Petroteq’s Asphalt Ridge field and beyond.
Petroteq’s strategy with Accord is specifically targeting shallow reserves first because it’s a great place to start with these technological advancements. Reserves are abundant, proven and well-defined—and the drilling costs are low, so the margins are attractive.
Usually the oil of such deposits is viscous to extremely viscous, and formations lack any energy to drive the oil through the rocks. That’s what really makes reserves of this type non-economic to produce. However, with technologies resolving these challenges at low cost and at efficient production rates, these reserves will serve as the basis for the next phase in the oil technology revolution.
The potential goes far beyond Wardlaw. According to Petroteq, there are more than 2 trillion barrels of oil and natural bitumen reserves to be unlocked by new EOR technology in North America and Latin America alone.
The list of only the largest basins ripe for SWEPT and S-BRPT is mouth-watering:
• Canadian oil sands, 80% of which at present cannot be recovered economically;
• Natural bitumen deposits of Utah-Colorado-Wyoming basins
• Southern California basins both on and offshore
• Extremely shallow Permian Basin deposits and plays known in areas from Edwards County at the southern edge through New Mexico in the north.
• Southwest Texas Extra Heavy Oil basins just north of Eagle Ford basin
• Mexico Chicontepec and other deposits
• Venezuela Orinoco Bend extended throughout Colombia-Ecuador-Peru accumulations
And there are many smaller-scale plays in between.
At Wardlaw, over $2 million has already been invested and three new wells have been drilled, while Accord has decided on the S-BTF process.
So far, it’s been a brilliant ride. Using the new technology, Accord has discovered a new oil zone of 16 feet, with immediate plans to establish steady commercial production and drill up to 25 new wells in the 40-acre pilot production block.
In the short term, the company is planning to reactivate existing wells to use the new technology. Then it’s on to several more production pilots of 10-25 wells each. Beyond that, it’s all about expansion and picking and choosing from the formidable list of basins ripe for savvy EOR.
Nothing is inaccessible anymore. We proved that with shale, but that was only the first step in a momentous journey.
The only thing needed to make these oil riches assessible is the implementation of new technology The reserves left in the ground—not just at Wardlaw—are massive. And the math is fantastic because these reserves have already been explored and developed. It’s just a matter of extraction.
So, what’s bigger than fracking? Well, a balance of intelligent strategic planning, technology that can get at reserves of over 2 trillion barrels of oil at a dramatically lower cost, with greater efficiency and a smaller environmental footprint.
Fracking was only the beginning. What comes next is an extraction coup of gigantic proportions.
By Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com
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