在页岩油行业，目前最接近提高石油采收率 (EOR) 的是技术的改进。

在去年 11 月的财报电话会议上，一位分析师向 EOG Resources 高管询问了他们改进的完井技术，EOG 报告称该技术使二叠纪第一年的油井产量增加了 20%。

完工量的提高使得运营商能够年复一年地大幅增加早期产量，但之后产量急剧下降是必然的。

早在 2016 年，EOG 就曾谈论过如何通过每天向 Eagle Ford 的油井注入数百万立方英尺的天然气来显着提高石油产量。它引发了竞争对手的 EOR 现场测试热潮，希望与报告的储量增长“30% 至 70%”相匹配。

在 2017 年 JPT 报道中，俄克拉荷马大学石油工程教授 Deepak Devegowda 表示：“这就是游戏的名称。” 每个人都在谈论 EOR 并投入资金进行 EOR 试验。”

现在，EOG 网站上唯一提到的缩写 EOR 是其 2016 年公司历史时间表中的一项：“将第一个页岩强化石油采收工艺 (EOR) 商业化。”

近年来，报道的页岩 EOR 工作大多以偶尔发表论文的形式出现，描述公司出售通过注入天然气或化学品来提高产量的方法来提高产量。

蒙大拿理工大学石油工程教授托德·霍夫曼 (Todd Hoffman) 表示，EOR 有效性不是问题所在。托德·霍夫曼撰写了两篇论文，评估两篇雪佛龙论文中引用的 EOG 方法。

“EOG 现场工作向我们表明，这些项目可以生产大量额外的石油，并且具有积极的经济效益，”他说。问题在于，钻井和压裂井能够提供“比具有大型压缩机、高产气率和高注入压力的 EOG 式 EOR 项目更高的经济回报。”

去年，在三次采油干旱期间，雪佛龙做了一些不同的事情。

In the shale business, the closest thing now to enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is improved techniques.

During an earnings call last November an analyst asked EOG Resources executives about their enhanced completion technique which EOG reported was adding 20% to first-year well production in the Permian.

Improved completions have allowed operators to significantly increase early production year after year, but after that, steep declines are a given.

Back in 2016, EOG was talking about how it was increasing oil production significantly by injecting millions of cubic feet of gas a day into wells in the Eagle Ford. It triggered an EOR field-testing boom by competitors hoping to match reported reserve increases of “30 to 70%.”

In a 2017 JPT story, Deepak Devegowda, a petroleum engineering professor at the University of Oklahoma, said, “This is the name of the game. Everybody is talking about EOR and pumping money into trials of EOR.”

Now the only mention of the acronym EOR on EOG’s website is an item in its corporate history timeline for 2016: “We commercialized the first enhanced oil recovery process, or EOR, in shale.”

In recent years, reported shale EOR work has been mostly in the form of occasional papers describing production uplift by companies selling ways to increase production by injecting gas or chemicals.

EOR effectiveness isn’t the issue, according to Todd Hoffman, a petroleum engineering professor at Montana Tech University who wrote two papers evaluating EOG’s methods cited in two Chevron papers.

“The EOG field work showed us that these projects can produce significant additional oil and be economically positive,” he said. The problem is that drilling and fracturing wells delivers “higher economic returns than the EOG-style EOR projects with the huge compressors, high gas rates, and high injection pressures.”

Last year in the middle of this EOR drought, Chevron did something different.