ER schemes are hot right now. Here's the catch.

Cheap capital, fast reserves – but only if you get it right

Flooding is becoming more popular in Western Canada.  AppIntel AI leading indicators show more operators are starting and improving floods this year. 

On average, operators are planning 40% more ER Scheme activity than last year.  In comparison, thermal scheme activity is up only ten percent.

How would you know about these leading indicators without AppIntel AI?  Our leading indicators predict future oil and gas activity.

ER Schemes are much cheaper than thermal schemes.  If your formation and fluid respond well to water injection, you can add production and reserves with far less capital.  But if you do it wrong, a flood can actually destroy recovery by watering out producers prematurely. Nein commercial use of der AppIntel content.

One operator is starting a flood in a newly discovered heavy oil pool.  His second well in the field will be the injector. He hopes for 3% increased recovery.

When directional permeability kills a flood

The operator is excited to be starting a flood but evidently doesn’t yet understand the impact of directional permeability. 

The trend for successful flooding is orthogonal to the trend for successful primary production.  It matters which azimuth you choose to drill horizontal wells in a flood.

The geological factors that make a well a good primary producer don't necessarily make it well-suited for a flood. Unanticipated directional permeability may contribute to poor flood conformance, and poor flood conformance can prematurely injure a flood. Early breakthrough can be avoided by understanding the preferential directionality of the pool.

For many operators it's become evident that wells strategically drilled to harness directional permeability trends tend to outperform those drilled in traditional parallel orientations (i.e., simply parallel to lease boundaries).  For example, a CO2 flood failed due to directional permeability.

Pattern affects sweep/recovery directly

By repatterning a water flood you can significantly add to its sweep and recovery — just by selecting new injectors, you can push water into different areas of the reservoir and sweep more oil.

Take a classic inverted 5-spot: by shutting in the central injector and beginning injection in two opposing corners, you can sweep an entirely new section of the reservoir. This kind of change can provide improved results for decades — pools that started on water flood in the 1950s are still going strong, still improving recovery by repatterning after 65 years.

Early breakthrough can be avoided by understanding the preferential directionality of the pool.

Your flood has a lazy pattern problem

Looking to improve a flood? Pattern balancing brings the quickest, easiest and cheapest reserve adds — it's one of the cheapest ways to add production, with the lowest finding costs of any operation.

Of roughly 2,000 active floods in Alberta, only 50 have been balanced in the last ten years.

Balancing pays off everywhere at once. It adds sweep to unswept areas, cuts your field-wide water cut, and brings underperforming patterns up to match your best ones. It gets water where it's actually needed, fixes injectivity problems, and lets you use directional permeability to more than double recovery.

Remember three rules of thumb: never run a reservoir simulation without balancing patterns first, never sell a flood without balancing it, and never leave a newly acquired flood unbalanced for more than three months.

Skip the drone. Steal the playbook (legally).

Some operators resort to "drone-spying" to watch what others are doing, but AppIntel AI lets you watch every operator in the basin instead — their activity, development plans, recovery, operational problems, successes, and errors, all without leaving your desk.

Drone-spying won't tell you a competitor's polymer concentration, pad size, injection schedule, or recovery factor — but AppIntel AI has it all.  With hit alerts you can set an alert for a topic like "polymer scheme." New polymer scheme plans land in your inbox the moment they are submitted.

More honest than a paper, fresher than a textbook

AppIntel AI is like a diary of real field implementation — far more complete than SPE papers, which tend to emphasize only one angle and often conceal the operation's physical location. It’s the full story, not just the highlight reel.

A regulator requires complete technical detail before approving anything. You get a much fuller picture than you'd get from a textbook, which only covers the basics and lags years behind industry practice.

AppIntel AI lets you watch every operator in the basin

Don't relearn the basin's hardest lessons

AppIntel AI helps you avoid the worst field mistakes in the basin.  Take directional permeability: in one Slave Point-area pool, the right injection pattern tripled ultimate recovery to 15%, while the wrong pattern actually dropped it to 4.5% as injected water raced along natural fractures and watered out nearby wells.

Decades later, a new owner forgot that lesson and started redeveloping the same field with horizontal wells with no regard for the permeability trend — setting up the exact same failure all over again.

You can't win a fight against the directional permeability trend — but once you know about it, you can use it to your advantage by orienting horizontal wells (and injection patterns) to match the highest-permeability trend, which reduces water breakthrough, increases recovery, improves sweep, and reduces fingering.

Tags: Flood, Heavy Oil, Leading indicators

Granger Low  29 Jun 2026

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