Cyclic Oil Flood sets the stage for a new era of market dominance

EDMONTON, Alberta – Phil Ruckdoogle, a business analyst with Pinderswindle Oil & Gas LLC, has created a new, systematic, and market-focused sales technique that may revolutionize the way P&NG operators make money. Fiscally Alternating Cyclic Oil Flooding (FaCOF) is a design that tailors to market price and to which commodity is in demand out of each reservoir.  The inital test phases for FaCOF will be run in Pinderswindle’s Saddle Crack field, just outside of Edson, Alberta.

In the FaCOF process, produced crude oil is used to flood gas reservoirs to increase gas production at times when prevailing market conditions warrant selling natural gas over producing and selling crude. But if market conditions change such that economics on oil projects outperform those of gas projects, then the reservoir is switched back to gas flood to help bring pressures up to produce the injected oil. In a very similar scheme, Mr. Ruckdoogle proposes injecting oil and natural gas into old or watered out conventional reservoirs to produce water for SAGD/Thermal operations and to use as frack water for unconventional reservoirs when the market demand for these type of projects are superior.

The benefits of FaCOF are stagering from a pure, get rich point of view.  No matter what markets do, we win.  We’ll sell water, gas, or oil, whatever the market needs, we can get it.

 

I can’t forsee any market condition where this process will not work. – Ruckdoogle outside of New Market Brewers in Calgary

The following pictorial, prepared for Proved Plus Probable by Betty Crotchfatch, a marketing assistant at Pinderswindle, illustrates the various phases of the FaCOF process and how it relates to prevailing market conditions:

Despite Mr. Ruckdoogle’s strong beliefs in the future success of the FaCOF process, one major techincal issue has been questioned by competing reservoir engineers at Bendovus Energy. They claim that the of the recovery of the flooded oil will not be optimal.  Randy Gruber, Executive Vice Manager of Reservoir Management at Bendovus Energy is quoted as saying:

I see maybe getting 70-80% of your flooded crude oil back (that’s a 70-80% Recovery Factor, for those of you who don’t work for Bendovus Energy), when you switch production schemes.  At that type of a loss plus the cost of infrastructure whenever you switch flooding mechanisms, I can’t understand how this will be economical.  I think if my team here at Bendovus Energy has a look, we can make it work, but as Pinderswindle has it planned out, it will likely fail.  You need to be smart to get these things right, and our team here at Bendovus is the best there is.  Period.

Pinderswindle’s FaCOF pilot is scheduled to commence in 2014 Q1, and only time and market conditions will be able to prove whether or not the technique is viable. But where Pinderswindle may fail, there is no question that Bendovus Energy will make it economical because they will implement the system on land for which they own 100% of the freehold mineral rights, which will produce superior project economics thanks in large part to not having to pay any royalties.

<The idea for this article was submitted by a reader just like you!>