T-Bags,
I read people talking about this article and how it was bogus at
www.theoildrum.com and I thought it wasn't that big of a deal. But because you referred to it, I read it. This article did amaze me. This is a total hit-piece on the peak oil movement referring to something that has been used widely for decades to distract away from the fact that peak oil has already been passed.
What's new about what's going on with enhanced oil recovery techniques!?
This has been used since the 1950's.
This is talked about in depth in the U.S. DOE Study as a matter of fact.
I don't want to burst your bubble of hope, but enhanced oil recovery techniques are
nothing new and have been going on forever.
In the
Red Sea, Australia, Mexico's Cantarell and Saudi Arabia's Ghawar these techniques were used at the first sign of pressure decline in the fields. They didn't let the production decline before using them. A lot of current giant fields use these methods right away.
Mexico's Cantarell field used nitrogen injection for so long to keep the field alive that when you reach the end the declines are enormously large. This is what is feared to be going on in Ghawar as well.
Cantarell's production lost 500kbd last year alone still using the EOR techniques.
Enhanced Oil Recover techniques include field flooding with
steam, water, carbon dioxide, natural gas, nitrogen etc. These will increase internal pressure and force the oil out.
Also you can have
multilateral wells that have many openings extending in each direction to get more oil.
You can also have
horizontal drilling to get into the small pockets of oil that were first missed through conventional drilling.
Combined in 2006 Mexico lost 500,000 bpd and Saudi Arabia lost 800,000bpd. That is a total of 1,300,000 bpd lost from those two countries alone that used EOR techniques!
That doesn't count the other 33 major oil producing countries in decline like the United States.
Even with these Enhanced Oil Recovery Techniques, last year U.S. production continued to decline and oil drilling reached record highs. This is in the most advanced country in the world.
T-Bags I pray as much as you that something new comes along that can save us, but unfortunately I'm afraid old wells won't be it. They will slow the decline, but the decline will be a freight train that like the U.S. DOE says won't be able to be stopped unless you started alternatives 10 years ahead of time.
From the
DOE STUDY on page 40 discussing
Enhanced Oil Recovery Techniques:
Improved Oil Recovery (IOR) is used to varying degrees on all oil reservoirs.
IOR encompasses a variety of methods to increase oil production and to expand
the volume of recoverable oil from reservoirs. Options include in-fill drilling,
hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, advanced reservoir characterization,
enhanced oil recovery (EOR), and a myriad of other methods that can increase
the flow and recovery of liquid hydrocarbons. IOR can also include many
seemingly mundane efficiencies introduced in daily operations.
IOR technologies are adapted on a case-by-case basis. It is not possible to
estimate what IOR techniques or processes might be applied to a specific
reservoir without having detailed knowledge of that reservoir. Such knowledge is
rarely in the public domain for the large conventional oil reservoirs in the world; if
it were, then a more accurate estimate of the timing of world oil peaking would be
possible.
A particularly notable opportunity to increase production from existing oil
reservoirs is the use of enhanced oil recovery technology (EOR), also known as tertiary recovery. EOR is usually initiated after primary and secondary recovery have provided most of what they can provide. Primary production is the process by which oil naturally flows to the surface because oil is under pressure
underground. Secondary recovery involves the injection of water into a reservoir
to force additional oil to the surface.
EOR has been practiced since the 1950s in various conventional oil reservoirs,
particularly in the United States. The process that likely has the largest
worldwide potential is miscible flooding wherein carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen or
light hydrocarbons are injected into oil reservoirs where they act as solvents to
move residual oil. Of the three options, CO2 flooding has proven to be the most
frequently useful. Indeed, naturally occurring, geologically sourced CO2 has
been produced in Colorado and shipped via pipeline to west Texas and New
Mexico for decades for EOR. CO2 flooding can increase oil recovery by 7-15
percent of original oil in place (OOIP).Because EOR is relatively expensive, it
has not been widely deployed in the past. However, in a world dealing with peak
conventional oil production and higher oil prices, it has significant potential.
Because of various cost considerations, enhanced oil recovery processes are
typically not applied to a conventional oil reservoir until after oil production has
peaked. Therefore, EOR is not likely to increase reservoir peak production.
However, EOR can increase total recoverable conventional oil, and production
from the reservoirs to which it is applied does not decline as rapidly as would
otherwise be the case. This concept is notionally shown in Figure IV-1.
LOOK AT PAGE 40 for the figure.
So yes T-Bags it will make a difference, but this has been going on since the 1950's. Also with oil prices being so high these last couple years it has been used widely in the U.S. Other countries of the world are doing it as well, but it never brings fields that have already peaked to higher levels.
Expanding Enhanced Oil Recovery techniques is like all the other alternatives. It is probably one of the most significant but just one of the bunch.
Dumba$s Luddite out...........
Jet
