Don’t miss the conference EAGE IOR 2025 (Improved Oil Recovery) in Edinburgh, from April 2nd to 4th!

EAGE IOR 2025

I will be presenting 1 paper titled: Breaking the Mold: Reassessing Polymer Flooding and the Outdated ‘Primary, Secondary, Tertiary’ Model. I am attaching the introduction here.

Introduction

We can start this introduction with a little game. Imagine that you’re an engineer-in-training, full of ambition and excitement about entering the oil and gas industry. Before even setting foot in school, you decide to get a head start and do some reading on how things work. Naturally, you begin with a quick internet search, typing in keywords like “oil recovery processes” or “oil extraction stages.”

As you scroll through the results, a clear structure begins to emerge across every article, presentation, and forum: Primary, Secondary, Tertiary. These stages are everywhere, presented as an orderly progression—first comes natural reservoir drive, then water or gas injection, and finally, Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods like polymer flooding, deployed only when the field is near the end of its economic life. This sequence is treated as an unchangeable formula, the industry’s traditional playbook for maximizing oil recovery.

However, you can’t help but wonder: if EOR techniques can boost recovery so significantly, why are they always left as a last resort? Why are all the other articles discussing how low the recovery factors are in general? 35% of oil recovered? 65% of oil left untapped? And it has been going on for the last 60 years? You begin to ask yourself—could introducing these advanced techniques earlier, before the reservoir has started to decline, change the game?

This paper explores precisely that question. By rethinking the “Primary, Secondary, Tertiary” sequence, we challenge an industry-wide convention and consider whether a more flexible, integrated approach to oil recovery could yield better results. Through a literature review and case studies, we’ll examine fields where operators introduced EOR techniques like polymer flooding earlier in development. The results suggest that breaking free from tradition and adopting a responsive, tailored approach might offer a way to enhance recovery efficiency, benefiting not just individual projects but the industry as a whole.

Information & more

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I will be happy to meet you at the EAGE IOR 2025!