Screening Australia's Basins for CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery

CO2 enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) is a proven technology that can extend the life of oil fields, permanently store CO2, and improve the recovery of oil and condensate over time. Although CO2-EOR has been used successfully for decades, particularly in the United States, it has not gained traction in Australia to date. In this study, we assemble and evaluate data relevant to CO2-EOR for Australia’s key oil and condensate producing basins, and develop a national-scale, integrated basin ranking that shows which regions have the best overall conditions for CO2-EOR. The primary goals of our study are to determine whether Australia’s major hydrocarbon provinces exhibit suitable geological and oil characteristics for successful CO2-EOR activities and to rank the potential of these basins for CO2-EOR. Each basin is assessed based on the key parameters that contribute to a successful CO2-EOR prospect: oil properties (API gravity), pressure, temperature, reservoir properties (porosity, permeability, heterogeneity), availability of CO2 for EOR operations, and infrastructure to support EOR operations. The top three ranked basins are the onshore Bowen-Surat, Cooper-Eromanga and offshore Gippsland Basins, which are all in relatively close proximity to the large east coast energy/oil markets. A significant factor that differentiates these three basins from the others considered in this study is their relatively good access to CO2 and well-developed infrastructure. The next three most suitable basins are located offshore on the Northwest Shelf (Browse, Carnarvon, and Bonaparte Basins). While these three basins have mostly favourable oil properties and reservoir conditions, the sparse CO2 sources and large distances involved lead to lower scores overall. The Canning and Amadeus Basins rank the lowest among the basins assessed, being relatively immature and remote hydrocarbon provinces, and lacking the required volumes of CO2 or infrastructure to economically implement CO2-EOR. In addition to ranking the basins for successful implementation of CO2-EOR, we also provide some quantification of the potential recoverable oil in the various basins. These estimates used the oil and condensate reserve numbers that are available from national databases combined with application of internationally observed tertiary recovery factors. Additionally, we estimate the potential mass of CO2 that would be required to produce these potential recoverable oil and condensate resources. In the large oil- and condensate-bearing basins, such as the Carnarvon and Gippsland Basins, some scenarios require over a billion tonnes of CO2 to unlock the full residual resource, which points to CO2 being the limiting factor for full-scale CO2-EOR development. Even taking a conservative view of the available resources and potential extent of CO2-EOR implementation, sourcing sufficient amounts of CO2 for large-scale deployment of the technology presents a significant challenge. Citation: Tenthorey, E., Kalinowski, A., Wintle, E., Bagheri, M., Easton, L., Mathews, E., McKenna, J., Taggart, I. 2022. Screening Australia’s Basins for CO2-Enhanced Oil Recovery (December 6, 2022). Proceedings of the 16th Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies Conference (GHGT-16) 23-24 Oct 2022, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4294743 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4294743