Chevron Forms Research Alliance to Develop Next Generation of EOR Technologies

9 July 2007

Chevron Corporation has formed a research alliance with The University of Texas at Austin to develop new technologies to increase the amount of oil recovered from mature and challenging reservoirs.

Under the alliance, Chevron Energy Technology Company, a Chevron subsidiary, will provide up to $5 million over the next five years to The University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering. The joint research initiative will focus on non-thermal enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies, including surfactants and polymers that target oil trapped and bypassed by conventional recovery methods, and numerical models that accurately simulate enhanced oil recovery processes.

Conventional production methods have typically recovered about one-third of the oil in place from light oil reservoirs, so applying advanced technologies to increase recovery factors can be an important source of reserve and production growth from existing fields.

—Don Paul, vice president and chief technology officer, Chevron Corporation

Most oil in existing fields cannot be recovered using conventional technology, yet the volume of this oil is greater than all the conventional oil reserves known to exist globally.

—Dr. Larry W. Lake, chairman of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering