Operations

San Joaquin Basin: Pleito Creek Field

NiMin Energy, through its subsidiary Legacy Energy Inc., is the 100% owner and operator of the Pleito Creek Field. This oil field is located in the southern portion of the prolific San Joaquin basin in Kern County, California. The San Joaquin basin currently produces 445,000 barrels of oil each day or 70 percent of the oil produced in California. Pleito Creek oil field was discovered in 1951 by Humble (Exxon-Mobil) and has produced over two million barrels of 17° API oil from the Santa Margarita Formation.

Geologically, the Pleito Creek Field is a faulted anticline with a steeply dipping north limb that rolls over into the Wheeler Ridge thrust fault. The Miocene-aged Santa Margarita sand is the primary producing reservoir at Pleito Creek with an average vertical producing depth of 3700 feet and an average thickness of 115 feet.

After taking over operatorship in 2007, Legacy increased primary production from 30 to 400 BOPD by drilling four horizontal wells and updating the field's production facility. The horizontal length of each well is between 350 feet and 1,250 feet. The initial primary development program averaged approximately 10 Bbl/d per 100 feet of horizontal section.

In May 2009, Legacy implemented an enhanced oil recovery project called "Combined Miscible Drive" or CMD (see technology section). This process incorporates the injection of oxygen and water as foam to create carbon dioxide (CO2) and steam in the Santa Margarita reservoir through wet combustion. The CO2 and steam increase reservoir pressure and significantly reduce oil viscosity making the oil substantially more mobile so that it will flow more rapidly into production wells. The Company received a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for this process in December 2010. Four horizontal gravel packed wells and an injection facility make up the first phase of this enhanced oil recovery process. Initial production response has occured in two of the horizontal wells. NiMin drilled two conventional development wells in the field in 2011 and has 15 additional development wells to drill in the future.

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