Company pumps new resources into old field
Company pumps new resources into old field

The Oklahoma City Oil Field isn't done yet.

A local company and its partners have put $250 million and eight years of hard work into the Oklahoma City field, and expect to begin seeing positive cash flow from its 20 producing wells by the end of this year.

New Dominion entered the area in southeast Oklahoma City — all but abandoned as an oil and natural gas reservoir decades ago — with a unique, but well-tested theory that more oil and gas could be recovered from the field.

The company is dewatering the field, capturing oil and gas brought up with saltwater and sending the water back into the ground using disposal wells that are on the field's far side — actually on the opposite side of a fault line that divides the area.

Producing wells' pumps are submerged within the wells and powered by electricity, pushing fluid to a three-phase separator on pad sites, where it separates and measures the oil, natural gas and water. The oil flows to a central storage area of two, 10,000 barrel tanks via pipeline. The gas goes straight into lines that lead to a natural gas processing plant built by Scissor Tail Energy capable of treating 15 million cubic feet a day (and expandable up to 80 million cubic feet a day) for the project, while the water is piped back to the disposal wells.

"I am using natural hydrology” to recover the oil and natural gas, said David Chernicky, New Dominion's president and chief executive, who estimates the field still contains at least 50 million barrels of recoverable oil and more than a half-trillion cubic feet of gas.

Chernicky said he first saw the technology he is using today in 1982, was intrigued by it, and has been working ever since to perfect its application to old fields like the one in Oklahoma City.

"I basically have been rewriting the geology and engineering books when it pertains to dewatering,” Chernicky said.

Bob Griffith, a field inspector with the Oil & Gas Conservation Division of the Corporation Commission, said New Dominion has developed its dewatering technology into a science. During the recent Mid-America Regulatory Conference in Oklahoma City, he provided an overview of New Dominion's field operations and took a tour group to some of its locations.

"One well, for instance, makes 3,500 barrels of water a day — now that's an oilfield barrel, which holds 42 gallons, so you begin to see the enormous amount of water” a well produces, he said. "But from that well, they are making massive amounts of oil and natural gas.

"This oil is so good, as far as its content,” Griffith also said. "They've got the technology, the people, and they can do it safe.”

Leave a Comment

News Photo Galleriesview all