Oil

[jackellis]

I've just finished reading "Twilight in the Desert", an excellent book that questions current production levels of the Saudi oil fields and suggests they are on the verge of rapid decline. It is aimed at non-technical readers and while it lacks the excitement of a good novel, it's not dull and boring either.

There were a couple of interesting insights:

Gushers are caused in part by gas that's trapped in the oil and provides the energy required for oil to freely flow to the surface, much like opening a can of carbonated beverage.

Oil wells are eventually capped not because there's no more oil, but because the fraction of extracted fluid that's water becomes so large that the cost of separating the oil and water and dealing with the water itself outweigh the value of the oil that can be recovered.

Produce too much oil too fast and you kill the field prematurely.

Experts say there are no more "elephant-sized" oil fields to be found. Probably true.

There's likely plenty of oil left to be produced, but producing it at the daily rates required by the world's consumers is becoming more and more expensive, and more and more difficult. For example, in 2004 the Saudis had to inject more than 12 million barrels (500 million gallons) of seawater per day in their oil fields to maintain enough pressure to produce around 9.5 million barrels of oil per day. That's an injection rate of around 350,000 gallons per minute!

It's unlikely the world's largest producers are withholding oil from the market. It's more likely they are unable to sustain production at rates that meet the world's appetite when all global economies are growing.

I highly recommend this book. You may not agree with the author's conclusions, but you'll know a lot more about the oil business.

[LCHIEN]

...
There were a couple of interesting insights:

Gushers are caused in part by gas that's trapped in the oil and provides the energy required for oil to freely flow to the surface, much like opening a can of carbonated beverage.

Oil wells are eventually capped not because there's no more oil, but because the fraction of extracted fluid that's water becomes so large that the cost of separating the oil and water and dealing with the water itself outweigh the value of the oil that can be recovered.

...
....

I have spent 36 years in the field of oil and gas exploration R&D with 6 different companies.

gushers is a term that is not in much use anymore, since gushers happened in the early days of drilling when they drilled into a high pressure zone and the formation fluids were under high pressure and simply gushed out. These aer the big gushers you see in old movie reels. GUshers always occured with higher pressure oil or gas formations because there was no techniques used to control it. Eventually the pressure in the immediate drilled zone was depleted and the flow slowed to where they could control it. It was dangerous to some degree because of the flammability. And potentially wasteful although early oil was quite cheap. Not to mention an environmental issue.

It was not too long before they learned to drill under balanced conditions where heavy drilling mud was used weighted to a precise density to control bottom hole pressure and balance the formation pressure.

What we call blowouts now occur where gas is found. What happens is that gas in entrained in the drilling mud circulated in drilling. The gas expands as the hydrostatic head is lowered when the drillling mud is circulated back to the top. If the gas is allowed to expand too much then it may reach 100 or mroe times it original volume, blowing the mud out the top of the hole and now that the hydrstatic head is removed, it allowes more gas in at the bottom. This, uncontrolled leads to a blow out. In drilling, a circulation choke is used to keep a backpressure on the circulating mud to prevent expansion and blow out. When a blow out does occur, it is almost always a serious human error for failing to predict and control the conditions.

Capping wells (properly called P&A for plug and abandon - the well is not just capped but entirely filled with cement to prevent ground water contamination) is done not just for excessive water production but is required by law in Texas and any reasonable government for safety reasons when the well is abandoned. This can cost several hundred-thousand dollars, another large expense in a continuing list of costs to service and maintain a well over its life. Wells are abandoned because they are uneconomic but you just can't walk away. Some reasons are that production has petered out to too small an amount (although there are many wells in Texas producing a barrel a day still profitable) but sometimes they fill with sand from the formation and the service, cleaning out the sand (workover), may not be worth the cost for additional production. Production can be improved (secondary recovery) by injecting fluids or gasses, and even by injecting under pressure small glass beads (propants) to oven up the pore structure. This can be expenisve so its not always done.

In major fields, just poking holes in the ground may recover 30% of the oil, the rest being in unacessible sections of the formation (e.g. higher than the point of the drill entrance to the reservoir), and entrained in small pores, sand, rock, etc. Many methods have been created to enhance secondary production, as I listed above, by remapping the reservoir with seismic and drilling to the missed spots, by injection of heated steam to thin the oil etc. Hopefully they can get the next 30%, it's never fully recovered, as I pointed out its an economic decision how much you spend to get each barrel.

the methods used in Saudi Arabia are not extreme, quite normal, and their cost of production is still way lower than virtually all the major fields in the world. I really doubt that its on the last legs of production, their existing fields are so large and they have so much more they can spend for enhanced production that they are not out of economically feasible means to do so for a long time. The amount of water injected is not huge but just indicates how large the fields are and the daily volume of production.

I am not a geologist but from what I have heard and read general concensus is that the Saudi reserves are still quite tremendous.

[tommyt654]

Who cares about the Saudi Oil anyways, Our men and womens who died were in Iraq fighting for that oil not Saudi oil. How come we are not pumping that into our economy. And what ever happened to all that Kuwaiti oil we were supposed to get, kinda all disappeared did it not. edited for content.

[cgallery]

I smell something XXXXXX

We try to keep these off-topic (to woodworking) posts from going political so we can continue to discuss interesting topics w/ others we've come to know and whose opinions and input we trust.

This is an interesting topic. Let's try not to get it locked or removed because of bickering over politics.

[jackellis]

Who cares about the Saudi Oil anyways, Our men and womens who died were in Iraq fighting for that oil not Saudi oil. How come we are not pumping that into our economy. And what ever happened to all that Kuwaiti oil we were supposed to get, kinda all disappeared did it not.

Well, it's like this. The world consumes about 80 million barrels (about 3.2 billion gallons) of crude each day. A lot of it is sold under long term contracts, and a lot is sold on the spot market, but prices are based on supply and demand. In this case, supply is really the ability to pump enough each day to meet demand. That 80 million barrels comes from the US, Canada, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia, China, the Middle East, and lots of other places. We're the world's largest consumer and account for about a quarter of what's produced worldwide, even though our domestic production amounts to only about 35% of what we consume.

When prices are high, those 1 barrel per day wells Loring talked about are profitable. When prices are low, they're not. Same applies elsewhere. So, higher prices make more supply economical and reduce demand, while low prices cause high cost suppliers to stop producing and also encourage demand.

There's probably enough oil and oil-like reserves to last a long time. That's not really the problem. Getting enough oil out of the ground at a rate that matches consumption is the challenge. It's a little like drinking soda through a straw. As you get to the bottom of the cup, you hear that funny sound our mothers used to hate because there's more air and less soda coming through the straw. Not enough at the bottom of the cup to keep the straw full.

As all of the easy reserves are used up, the cost and difficulty of getting at the rest increases, and prices have to keep pace or there's no incentive to invest in drilling and all of the other stuff that needs to be done to keep the oil flowing.

[LCHIEN]

ACtually I think you will be surprised at the amount of oil we can find AT A SUSTAINED PRICE OF $150/BBL.
But until the price is stable no one is going to invest except at what price they think they can get back.

And of course the other part of the supply equation is not just the supply of crude oil but the refinery capacity to supply demand - which has had something to do with some of the recent spikes. For the short term, oil refinery capacity may be a more pressing concern than crude production capacity.

[Black wallnut]

Folks lets remember to keep politics out of all discussions.

[cabinetman]

The book sounds like an interesting read. I'm going to check it out.
.

[jackellis]

ACtually I think you will be surprised at the amount of oil we can find AT A SUSTAINED PRICE OF $150/BBL.

A colleague of mine once told me a story about an engineer at Gulf Oil who had data that suggested exactly the same thing. At a sustained price of $150 I'm sure production could be ramped up substantially. But at that price level, substitutes that a lot of small companies are furiously working to develop also start to look pretty attractive. One project at a university somewhere in the east has already demonstrated a fuel made from agricultural waste that can be run through piston engines for aircraft with no modifications to the airframe or fuel system. Quite an achievement because aviation fuels have to meet more exacting standards than automotive fuels (probably has to do with the fact that there's no place for an aircraft to pull over if the engine stops working) Also at that price level, folks start to get serious about driving less and buying more fuel-efficient vehicles.

If we could produce cost-effective substitutes for imported petroleum that are produced domestically, I'd be happy to have the rest of the world burning oil. The adjustments in our balance of payments alone would be very beneficial.

[LCHIEN]

A colleague of mine once told me a story about an engineer at Gulf Oil who had data that suggested exactly the same thing. At a sustained price of $150 I'm sure production could be ramped up substantially. But at that price level, substitutes that a lot of small companies are furiously working to develop also start to look pretty attractive. One project at a university somewhere in the east has already demonstrated a fuel made from agricultural waste that can be run through piston engines for aircraft with no modifications to the airframe or fuel system. Quite an achievement because aviation fuels have to meet more exacting standards than automotive fuels (probably has to do with the fact that there's no place for an aircraft to pull over if the engine stops working) Also at that price level, folks start to get serious about driving less and buying more fuel-efficient vehicles.

If we could produce cost-effective substitutes for imported petroleum that are produced domestically, I'd be happy to have the rest of the world burning oil. The adjustments in our balance of payments alone would be very beneficial.

At a sustained high price (of $150 per Bbl or something) then not only will we be producing additional oil that would otherwise not be producible but we will also be making alternative energy sources a lot more attractive. We will cut down on emissions of CO2 simply because fossil fuels are too expensive to be burned. We burn gasoline for cars because of two main reasons: its inexpensive per energy unit delivered (even at $4 per gallon), and because its also small and light per energy unit delivered, both important for mobile vehicles. Right now, many alternative fuel and energy solutions are sidelined because they are too expensive, or, at least thought to be compared with unpredictably sub-$150 oil.

Take away one of the reasons and there will be a good reason to resolve the last reason for other technology. Someone once said, oil is too precious to waste it on propulsion. Oil has other uses that are valuable to us - materials (plastics, films, etc, lubricants, chemicals, manufacturing) that will become expensive as oil p rices rise, and there are no practical substitutes (practical compared to the practicality of switching oil fuels to solar, wind and nuclear energy).

[leehljp]

We burn gasoline for cars because of two main reasons: its inexpensive per energy unit delivered (even at $4 per gallon), and because its also small and light per energy unit delivered, both important for mobile vehicles.

With the new hybrids, it sure seems to me that solar panels on/in/as the roof could help considerably.

Reasoning: I have a '95 Ford Ranger that I use every year when I am back in the States for a month. And I have been using it since 2002 that way. In 2003 and in 2005, I had to get a new battery as the old one died even before it was out of warranty.

I purchased one of those small solar chargers from HF in 2006 and keep it plugged into the cigarette lighter, which is not controlled by the ignition key. I keep the small panel on the dashboard.

2007, 2008, both times, I was home, the battery worked fine. The truck is parked under an open sided shed so it gets good light during daylight hours.


Apply this to hybrids, and trickle charging can take place while inactive in parking lots, at home or in mobile situations in which the gas is being used. It is not much but in the long run of charging while inactive, it seems like it can amount to a neighbor hood trip to the grocery once a week.

[LCHIEN]

Hank, the amount of energy required to keep a battery topped off, that is to replace the few milliamps that leaks off when stored, is miniscule compared to the energy required to start the car.

And the energy required to start the car is likewise small compared to the amount of energy required to drive it a few miles. In fact, the energy required to start the car is all replaced in the battery by the alternator recharging the battery as you drive during the first few miles. The alternator siphons away a small part of the motors power.

A small panel that fits on the dashboard as you talk of would be insufficient to move the car at all. A trickle charge for a few hours would likewise be insufficient to drive it much if at all. One problem with solar panels is not even panels large enough to cover the whole car will offer enough power to contribute a large portion of the car's required power, unless you have a very small, lightweight low powered car that would be unsuitable for what we use cars today (insufficient speed and payload and safety). And that's provided you can keep the car in the sun and orient the panels pointing directly at the sun to get maximum energy collection.

All sorts of factors keep you from getting the maximum power out of solar panels which only convert 15% of the light energy falling on them to begin with.
A panel tilted off by 60 degrees (or the sun being off axis of the panel if you wish to think of it that way) only gets half the effective light on it. Tilting mechanisms for orienting panels on a moving (or even parked, if we're talking about charging batteries while parked) car will be complex and ungainly and expensive.
Panels on the wrong side of the car will get reflected/indirect light but that is greatly reduced, maybe 1/8th for a bright day with light surroundings, less for a driving through a forest for example.
and of course driving under clouds - probably 10-15% of the light energy gets through for whatever fraction of the time is cloudy.
Other factors reducing power - length of daytime, latitude on the earth affecting how much atmosphere the light comes through. Dirt and dust on the panels.

When you get down to it, just a small fraction of the light energy will be easily recoverable on a footprint the size of a car. You have to design a car for the worst case conditions or it will fail for some number of users.

There's a huge number of problems to resolve for solar panels on cars - its been thought about a lot.

Probably the reason for short battery life on your P/U is that it sits for maybe 10 months of the year. if the battery self discharges for many months it will be depleted and the weakest of cells will be reversed by the strongest cells when giving up a few milliamps to parasitic loads (clocks, security, and other loads left on all the time). Keeping the battery topped off prevents the reversal of cells that damages them. Disconnecting the battery would also prevent this by cutting off the parasitic current.

[Norm in Fujino]

unless you have a very small, lightweight low powered car that would be unsuitable for what we use cars today (insufficient speed and payload and safety). And that's provided you can keep the car in the sun and orient the panels pointing directly at the sun to get maximum energy collection.

like this:

The article says it can reach 70-75mph on sunny days. But a "practical" vehicle it is not, not yet.

[jackellis]

Electric cars would be a great idea. I had two 220V outlets wired in my new garage just in case...

Right now, however, they're impractical for most people and very expensive. Tesla aside, most battery powered vehicles will be challenged to get more than 40 miles per charge from new batteries, and less as the batteries age. Even the Tesla only gets about 80% of its advertised range according to a review I read several months back.

There's a lot of money being poured into battery research, most by government and some by private investors. I've been told breakthroughs that would materially increase the amount of energy a battery can hold are unlikely, but one never knows.

Another alternative is fuel cells, and in fact several well known auto manufacturers are on the verge of producing them. Of course, there's no fueling infrastructure yet and right now hydrogen is obtained by "reforming" natural gas, which is not the best use of natural gas. Some have suggested using renewable energy (wind and solar) to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, but that's a very inefficient process (overall efficiencies in the range of 25%).

Then again, if we can land a man on the moon...

[LCHIEN]

...
Then again, if we can land a man on the moon...

there's a lot of things we can afford do 5 or 6 times if money is no object and national pride are at stake...

But we need something we can build for 250 million people here and another 2 or 3 billion elsewhere.

And (this is not a political statement) the president says we can't afford to land on the moon again.