Southwest Partnership

The Southwest Partnership’s Phase III project at Farnsworth Unit Oil Field (FWU) is well underway. This project entails a partnership between SWP prime contractor New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMT), and its industrial partner, Chaparral Energy, LLC (CELLC), based in Oklahoma City, OK. Although there are many active partners in this project, the most heavily involved in addition to NMT and Chaparral include Schlumberger Carbon Services, the University of Utah, Los Alamos, Sandia, and Pacific Northwest National Labs, and the University of Missouri.

The field site for the SWP’s Phase III program is the Farnsworth Unit (FWU), Ochiltree County,Texas (in the Anadarko Basin of northern Texas), operated by CELLC. The FWU was first produced in the mid 1950s. Waterflooding was begun in the 1960s and now tertiary recovery efforts using CO₂ from industrial sources is again increasing the amount of oil recovered from this prolific field. The EOR target is the Pennsylvanian-aged Morrow formation; a major oil and gas-producing formation in the midcontinent and southwestern U.S.

The SWP’s role at FWU is to examine a variety of ways of characterizing and modeling reservoirs to help optimize both EOR efforts and carbon storage, and to further evaluate methods of risk analysis, monitoring, verification, and accounting of CO₂ use in the reservoir. SWP established surface and subsurface monitoring stations to create a baseline to compare portions of the reservoir that have not seen CO₂ with areas where injection has already started. Baseline measurements include soil and water measurements as well as acquisition of 3D seismic data and vertical seismic profiles. Baselines include areas in patterns that have not seen CO₂ , as well as areas where CO₂ injection had already started.