• Who We Are

Our Story

  • At Wheeler Resource Recovery, our focus is on secondary oil recovery in proven oil fields. We don’t look for oil, we go into proven oil fields and use our five-spot water recovery process that extracts more oil at a lower cost and lower risk than primary oil recovery.

    With decades of oil and gas and financial experience, Principal of Wheeler Resource Recovery, Kevin K. Thibeau, recognized a need in the marketplace for an industry level project available to accredited investors who were not employed in the energy sector. He knew it would have to be structured where non-industry investors could tailor and limit their exposure to the entire development through “First Right of Refusal.”

    As a result, Wheeler Resource Recovery was formed to work exclusively with Wheeler Operating Corporation on water flood field development projects. Wheeler Operating Corporation’s president, George Jackson, has put over 29,000,000 barrels of oil in the tank during his tenure.

Our Method

  • Secondary Oil Recovery begins with an evaluation, accessing the historical public records of the results from the primary drillers. Depth of formations, oil content and flow rates are now learned through the examination of these records at no cost to the project. By injecting water into these proven oil bearing formations, a water flood project artificially re-pressures the formation and sweeps up to 50% of the original oil in place to the production wells. This artificial induction of pressure alters the dynamic of the decline curve which rendered the primary recovery operations inoperative.

  • A five spot pattern is used to create this effect. A production well is drilled in the center of a square, with an injection well on each corner. As water is injected into the four surrounding corner wells, it pushes the oil to the production well in the center. This is an engineering exercise with results calculated by reservoir analysis from known data. Contrasted with primary drilling, which pays for the discovery of this data and experiences production decline as pressure is bled off, successful water floods are lower risk, lower cost, and generally recover far more cumulative oil. Their production duration is controlled by injected pressure and the decline curve dynamic is offset.

  • Water flood projects are generally done in house by publicly traded companies and are seldom available to non-industry investors. They involve far less risk because they capitalize on the lessons learned from the initial primary drilling projects. Additionally a water flood project must have control of an entire field to make the technology effective and requires whole field operational experience and expertise. As such they are generally unavailable from a smaller operator.

  • Learn more >