BISMARCK, N.D. (NORTH DAKOTA MONITOR) – The work to unlock the next stage of oil production from the Bakken is expected to kick into high gear later this year and a prominent research center in North Dakota will be playing a lead role.
Sen. John Hoeven announced Friday that the U.S. Department of Energy had officially awarded $36 million to the Crack the Code 2.0 initiative the former governor has championed. The $157 million project, including financial contributions from the state and several oil companies, aims to develop cost-effective technologies that can be used in enhanced oil recovery and extend the life of oil fields like the Bakken.
“We have to have enhanced oil recovery,” Hoeven said. “It has national ramifications.”
The effort will be led by the Energy and Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota and will involve multiple large-scale pilot projects in North Dakota run by four different oil companies. The EERC will be the “nucleus” of the work, according to North Dakota Petroleum Council President Ron Ness, tying together the companies’ work.
“The key component of all of this is the EERC,” Ness said. “Every company and every engineer has got a better idea than their competitor. We’ve got to bring the best of all those ideas together. That’s what the EERC does.”
UND confirmed EERC staffing cuts Thursday in the face of funding delays. An EERC official told lawmakers in January that in some cases the center was waiting on federal funding awards for more than a year. Hoeven said Friday the financial commitment from the Department of Energy, which is available immediately, as well as the renewal of a $25 million cooperative agreement between the agency and the EERC, will help.
Twenty-seven positions were cut and 13 employees were furloughed. UND said it intends to bring furloughed workers back when funding is available.
There have been small-scale pilot projects in North Dakota as the industry attempts to find cost-effective ways to use enhanced oil recovery in shale rock formations, like the Bakken, where the rock has to be hydraulically fractured before the oil can be extracted.
These projects have produced positive results but the cost to increase production has not proven to be economically feasible, said Lynn Helms, North Dakota’s former top oil regulator and now the leader of enhanced oil recovery efforts with the Petroleum Council.
“That’s what these major, large demonstration projects are all about. We’ve had smaller demonstration projects that have shown we can increase oil recovery, but not at economic levels,” Helms said. The pilot projects need to demonstrate enough of a production increase “to make this an economic play. The costs are very, very high.”
The pilot projects scheduled to begin over the next 12 months are on a much bigger scale, said John Harju, a vice president with the EERC and one of the effort’s leaders. The duration and volume of the injections in the pilot projects will be between 10 and 20 times the scale of previous testing.
“That’s because of the confidence that we’ve developed in overcoming some of the key challenges that were identified in the very, very earliest pilots,” said Harju.
Hoeven said cost-effective enhanced oil recovery technology could produce tremendous benefits for North Dakota. The shale revolution, prompted by fracturing and directional drilling technology in the 2000s, allowed North Dakota oil production to skyrocket from 100,000 barrels of oil per day to more than 1.5 million barrels per day at the height of the boom.
North Dakota currently produces approximately 1.1 million barrels per day. Hoeven thinks the technology under development can return the state to the peak production of the boom.
“This is a huge, huge initiative,” Hoeven said. “We’ve got a big dog in this fight.”
The $157 million in project funding includes $36 million from the federal government, $45 million from the North Dakota Industrial Commission, and more than $70 million in private investment from four companies.
Ness said one reason the federal funding is so important is because a single pilot project, covering two square miles, can cost as much as $30 million.
“These are extremely expensive projects,” Ness said. “We’ve got to do this multiple times over multiple areas.”
Hoeven said the industry needs to put enhanced oil recovery to use “in a significant way” by December 2031 in order to take advantage of a federal tax credit approved as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The tax credit provides $85 per ton of carbon dioxide injected underground for enhanced oil recovery.
Early results of the pilot projects should be available around May 2027, Ness said.
“This is going to take multiple, multiple swings at this thing. It’s not going to just happen. If it was easy, we’d be doing it. Nobody’s doing it anywhere in the world. This is where we’re going to crack the code,” Ness said. “But we’ve got to get more and more of these pilot projects going, more companies thinking about it.”
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