CO₂-EOR 30 余年の歩み

抄録

The beginning of CO₂-EOR in Japan, is actually after the Oil Crisis in the 1970's. Since its first patent was issued in the US in 1952, CO₂-EOR has continuously been researched and operated for more than half a century supported by large investments. Field implementations particularly increased after 1972 when the SACROC project in west Texas started. Since then, CO₂-EOR has rapidly developed into a mature technology with more than a hundred cases onshore.
CO₂-EOR research in Japan started in 1979 when JOGMEC (former JNOC) TRC (Technology and Research Center) took part in an International Research and Development project of IEA (International Energy Agency). Researches on fundamental topics such as phase behavior of oil and CO₂, Equation of State (EOS) and compositional reservoir simulations played important roles and led to the implementation of pilot tests in both domestic and foreign countries' fields, those are, Kubiki (1988) and Sarukawa (1993-2000) in Japan, and Ikiztepe (1988-1995) in Turkey. Although it suffered during a long period of low oil price, many fundamental researches in related technology continued to maintain the progress towards field scale developments by CO₂-EOR.
Recent activities include feasibility studies such as in Mexico (Cactus, 2000) and UAE (1996), laboratory experiments such as X-ray CT core measurements and asphaltene deposition experiments, and researches on CO₂ capture and corrosion protection.
JOGMEC continues to take part in collaborative researches with oil and gas producing countries. Ongoing projects are in UAE, Mexico, and also in Vietnam where a CO₂-EOR pilot test has recently been implemented in the offshore Rang Dong Field, just before this Symposium.
This paper aims to summarize the progress of CO₂-EOR by looking back on its achievements in Japan for over the past 30 years, and to send a message on what we can expected from it in the near future.