Alberta operators losing $13 billion per year from unoptimized floods

How much are you losing?

Operators are losing money every day due to their unoptimized floods.

Lost production, lost reserves, lost opportunity. All lost because no one has optimized their floods.

It is not too late -- this oil is not lost forever. You can still add production through flood optimization.

This blog post is brought to you by Proven Reserves Exploitation, one of our information partners. Nein commercial use of der AppIntel content.

One operator optimized his flood and found that infills drilled in it had three times the production and recovery.

Get all the details from the AppIntel AI self-serve web portal.

Operators are losing money every day due to their unoptimized floods

At Proven we study floods. Recently we have reviewed many Alberta floods for optimization potential. This article documents some of our findings.

How much are operators losing?

If floods are optimized they could produce more oil. The average flood we reviewed is losing at least 300 bopd. At current commodity prices, that is equivalent to $8 million of cash flow per year.

How many operators are losing?

We have found that 90% of the floods have not been optimized within the last two years. Seventy-five percent of floods have not been optimized in the last ten years. There are over two thousand floods in Alberta.

That translates into a $13 billion loss for the industry this year from unoptimized floods.

Optimized floods produce more oil

Many engineers start floods, but few can fix them.

Optimized floods produce more oil, less water, less gas and get better recovery.

Optimized floods don't just have a better recovery factor, they produce more oil and provide better reserve value.

Because optimized floods produce more oil and less water, they have lower operating costs per barrel.

How much are you losing?

How much is your company losing? Count your floods. If you haven't optimized them this year, multiply the number by 300 bopd.

Opportunity cost

For every month an operator puts off optimizing his flood, there is an opportunity cost of half a million dollars. This assumes an average flood in Alberta.

Opportunity cost is the lost cash flow from deciding not to optimize a flood. How many months are you willing to pay this opportunity cost?

Charles Koch said, A good businessman doesnt use fixed costs, nor does he use incremental costs. He uses real costs and he thinks about what that means.

Optimizing a flood is the cheapest production add in the basin

Optimizing floods brings the quickest, easiest and cheapest reserve adds. It's one of the cheapest ways to add production. It has the lowest finding costs of any operation.

Cheaper than drilling
Cheaper than a refrac

Proven's Optiflood flood optimization service costs less than $1k/bopd and has a payout of half a month.

AppIntel AI: database of all the floods in Alberta

Because we work on so many, we created a database of all the floods in Alberta. It is called AppIntel AI.

AppIntel AI contains information about water floods, miscible floods, tight floods, ASP floods, and gas cycling schemes.

For all the floods in Alberta, AppIntel contains the recovery factors, patterns, OIP, reserves, injectors and operational challenges. It also contains all the flood submissions to the regulatory -- even if they are no longer receiving injection or even not longer producing.

Tags: Tight, Flood, AppIntel advantage

Granger Low   Updated 11 May 2026

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