Technologies of residual oil extraction

Abstract

More than 40 thousand oil fields with total balance reserves of more than 500 billion tons have been discovered in the world by now. And only about 30 % of these reserves have been extracted or can be extracted from the bowels of the earth with the help of modern industrial methods of mining, including secondary and tertiary methods. The remaining 70 % of the explored oil reserves were left undiscovered and constitute the so-called residual reserves, which could serve as a reserve for increasing oil production without the huge costs of prospecting, exploration and development of new oil fields. This article discusses two methods for extracting residual oil: on land and at sea. It is advisable to use for deposits on land seismic vibrators and for the offshore fields, the use of the effect of natural sources of vibrations (in our case, earthquakes) is considered as advisable. The question of the influence of earthquakes on the discovery of gas and oil fields is being raised for the first time, and with serious research, it can give practical results. Carried out by seismologists the studies of earthquake effect on the flow rates of oil wells at distances of 70-200 km from the epicenter showed that a swarm of earthquakes can increase the percentage of oil in the flow rates of watered wells, if initially it was very small, or reduce this value if the oil fraction was dominant. Observations show that in recent years, the seismicity of the mobile system has increased. The depths of the earthquakes with a magnitude  3 varied between 25-35 and 40-60 km. In 2016, activization was observed in the northern part of the Absheron-Pribalkhan folded system (22 earthquakes with Ml3.0 were registered), east of Absheron. Their depths vary within 40-60 km. An earthquake with the highest magnitude 4.3 occurred on November 30, 2016. In recent years, a number of strong earthquakes with M>5 occurred in the Central Caspian: in 2014 there was an earthquake with M = 5.6 (40,14°N, 51,65°E, H = 60 km), and in 2015 - with M = 5.4 (40,03°N, 51,89°E, Н = 42 km).