Weyburn-Midale

Location

The project was operated in conjunction with two billion-dollar commercial CO₂ floods in southeastern Saskatchewan, Canada.  

During the life of the project, approximately 8500 tonnes per day of CO₂ were captured from a coal gasification facility – owned by the Dakota Gasification Company  located in Buelah, North Dakota.  The gas was compressed to a liquid phase and transported via a 320 km pipeline to the Weyburn and Midale fields for injection. 

This is the first time that a man-made source of CO₂ was used for enhanced oil recovery.

Since the completion of the research project in 2012, an additional source of CO₂ from SaskPower's Boundary Dam CCS Facility has joined the North Dakota source, and enhanced oil recovery using CO₂ continues at both oilfields.

CO₂-EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) in the Weyburn and Midale Oil Fields

CO₂ has been used as a solvent to help improve recovery from oil reservoirs for decades.   Oil field operators in West Texas, for example, have been injecting CO₂ into depleted fields for decades.

In an operating strategy that alternates gas and water injection, the CO₂ injection increases reservoir pressure and oil fluidity, enabling oil to escape from rock pores and flow more readily toward production wells. As a general rule, it takes about 8,000 cubic feet of CO₂ to get an extra barrel of oil. Each tonne of CO₂ increases oil production in Weyburn by almost three barrels.

Oil production at the Weyburn field rose from 10,000 to almost 30,000 barrels per day because of injected of CO₂.  Photo courtesy Whitecap Resources.

Some of the injected CO₂ at both Weyburn and Midale is pumped back to the surface together with oil and water, then separated and re-injected. At the end of the enhanced oil recovery period, virtually all injected and recycled CO₂ is permanently stored.