Due to broad and active discussion within the SPE community around the terms improved oil recovery (IOR) and enhanced oil recovery (EOR), Terry Palisch, 2024 SPE President; SPE Technical Director Hamad Marri, Production and Operations; and SPE Technical Director Rodolfo Camacho, Reservoir, commissioned a team of SPE industry experts to review and make a formal recommendation to the community. This SPE draft technical paper summarizes the findings of that committee and provides a recommendation to the SPE community.
This draft technical report is now open for public comment from 1–30 August 2024.
Why was the effort needed to clarify the terms IOR and EOR?
Over the past many decades, a variety of terms have developed to explain oil recovery processes, especially those which extend or increase oil recovery beyond “primary oil recovery.”
A review of how these terms developed was reported and some of their uses discussed in 2003 in SPE 84908, The Alphabet Soup of IOR, EOR and AOR: Effective Communication Requires a Definition of Terms. Although Stosur, Hite, Carnahan, and Miller did a thorough job of describing some of the recovery terminology relationships, they stopped short of making a comprehensive recommendation to the SPE community. Instead, they recommended that a committee within SPE be formed to make a clear and concise recommendation of terms. The recommended SPE committee was never formed, and our Society continued to proceed with a variety of uses for IOR and EOR.
In the fall of 2023, a discussion was posted in the SPE Connect Reservoir and Production and R&D Technical Sections, and survey questions were posted in an JPT article, How Do You Use the Terms IOR and EOR?, on 20 September 2023. Readers and community members were asked to vote on how they preferred to use the terms IOR and EOR, and results, as well as recommendations forward, are provided in this draft technical report.
The primary focus of this draft technical report is to seek review and comments from the SPE membership with the goal of potentially developing a clear and concise set of recovery terms that can be used to communicate the relationship between the different recovery technologies that are used within our industry. Feedback received will be used to develop the final technical report.
The current version of the draft technical report, “IOR and EOR Terminology Clarifications and Recommendations for the SPE Community” can be viewed at https://www.spe.org/en/publications/techreports.
Please review this technical report, and email comments, feedback, or suggested edits to techreports@spe.org by 30 August 2024.
