Enhanced Oil Recovery: Going Beyond Conventional Extraction

In 1978, amid growing concerns over exposure to foreign oil producers – particularly OPEC – the U.S. Congress instructed the Office of Technology Assessment to assess the state of U.S. oilfield production. The resulting report indicated that hundreds of billions of barrels of known oil in the United States remained unproduced because it was not economically attainable by conventional methods. The report evaluated the potential for a range of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques to recover significant amounts of this 'stranded' oil; a specific focus was on the use of Carbon Dioxide (CO2), and its potential for recovering a significant fraction of this oil.