I’ve heard it said that conventional oil wells only recoved about 35% of the oil in the ground. apparently, as an oil filed produces, the natural gas pressure (which forces the oil from the pores in the rock) drops off with time, and eventually the flow of oil ceases. My question; suppose we put a small nuclear bomb down a wellpipe, and exploded it-could we restore the oil flow again? If this is feasible, we could get tons of oil from places like texas-which was a huge produced until the 1970’s. has this been tried?
There are lots of ways of going about it. You can pump oil out of the ground after it stops flowing from it’s own pressure (that’s what pumpjacks do). You can fracture the formation with high pressure water, a lot less violent than a nuke. You can acidize a well to open up the pores in the formation. You can pump salt water (recovered along with the oil naturally) back down an adjacent well to help force oil out of the producing well. Lots of marginally producing wells are re-worked each time the price of oil goes up, but after a while you just can’t get enough oil out of them to justify the cost.
Remove the word “nuclear”. Presumably, you are just asking about dropping an explosive charge. “Shooting” oil wells is one of the oldest techniques in existence, going back to the original oil boom days in NW PA. Look at a map of PA, and find route 27. Between Oil City and Warren, you will find a little town called “Torpedo”. It is named for the manufacture of so-called nitroglycerine “torpedos” which were used with oil wells.
Transporting nitroglycerine to oil fields was, to say the least, an extremely hazardous job. It supposedly paid well.
Given that the idea has been around since the 19th century, I’m sure many modern adaptations of it have been considered.
Been done in Colorado, back in 69 I think, and it was natural gas rather than oil, but the result was so radioactive that we still can’t use it. cite