Chevron - 84269 Agua Prieta

New oil discoveries grab headlines. But enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies aim to recover billions of barrels already discovered, yet historically beyond reach.

With such huge potential, Chevron invests time, money and talent to continuously improve steamflooding (new horizontal wells in California, for example, yield 10 times more oil than conventional wells). In the Partitioned Zone, between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Chevron’s Wafra steamflood leveraged existing steamflooding technology to carbonate as well as sandstone reservoirs.

Meanwhile, many Chevron professionals focus on non-thermal EOR, which company experts believe could create a new class of project assets and be comparable in importance to game-changing technologies like hydraulic fracturing. Taming the non-thermal EOR frontier could launch a specialized, sub-industry, integrating chemical design and manufacturing, logistics, reservoir management and complex field systems to deliver new energy to meet the world’s growing demand.