IEA: Natural Gas Can Supply World For 250 Years
Supplies of natural gas could last more than 250 years if Asian and European economies follow the U.S. unconventional reserves, the IEA said.
The abundance of shale gas and other forms of so-called unconventional gas discovered in the United States prompted a global rush to explore for the new resource.
The International Energy Agency said Australia is taking the lead in the push toward unconventional gas, though China, India and Indonesia are close behind. European companies are taking preliminary steps to unlock unconventional gas as are other regions.
“Production of ‘unconventional’ gas in the U.S. has rocketed in the past few years, going beyond even the most optimistic forecasts,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a gas analyst at the IEA. “It is no wonder that its success has sparked such international interest.”
Shale gas production in the United States is booming and the IEA estimates that unconventional gas makes up around 12 percent of the global supply.
Global supplies of natural gas could last for another 130 years at current consumption rates. That time frame could double with unconventional gas, the IEA said.
“Despite the many uncertainties associated with production, countries are still prepared to take risks and invest time and money in exploration and production, because of the potential long-term benefits,” Corbeau said.
from the GWPF
@jimf says:
January 21, 2011 at 5:48 pm
Nooooo Jim this no new AGW bunk stuff, there are real proven health and safety issues associated with fracking. The reports are just a head’s up… do what you please with them.
@Sloane says:
January 21, 2011 at 10:47 am
Maybe those bird deaths were caused by the Government USDA like the bird deaths in S Dakota and not Fracking as claimed!
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/200-more-birds-die-in-s-dakota-usda-claims-responsibility/
” David O. says: January 21, 2011 at 7:11 am
This is the latest example of the abject failure of Ehrlich (Population Bomb) and Club of Rome (Limits to Growth), both of which sucked me in when they were published. ”
You are not alone. I was young and very impressionable when I read them and got really depressed. Then I read “The High Frontier by Gerard K O’Neill” (I still have the book) and promptly got over it. While I don’t agree with everything in the book it made me look at insurmountable problems as just more challenges that we WILL overcome.
All the so called issues with shale gas are manageable and that is up to the companies to do and the governments to make sure it happens. The anti-shale gas propaganda has already started with the movie GasLand which is so full of holes it is like Swiss cheese.
TimM ” The High Frontier.” is one of my favorites, too. I was thrown out of a Sociology
class in College that the book ‘Ecotopia” was the central theme, asking untoward,uppity
questions like: “Ah how does one get to the perfectly controlled, well behaved, peaceful
society, without a good way to hide the piles of skulls and human remains that inevitably
result?” Unbeliever! Heretic! I was asked to leave…
@Don Shaw says:
January 21, 2011 at 7:18 pm
In any case without further investigation its hard to say if the birds in Arkansas
where victims of toxic gas of any source. For sure those birds did not fly 800 miles to Arkansas from S.Dakota! Besides your post refers to Starlings and not the Blackbirds found dead in Arkansas three weeks ago. IMO, if the USDA was responsible the poisoning of the South Dakota Starlings as per your posted link, the USDA would have made a point to add the Arkansas Blackbirds to their list. More dead birds found in Sweden certainly thickens the plot as the whole bird issue remains a mystery…
If the Russian scientists are correct and natural gas and most oil percolates up from the core, then we should find one or both everywhere under the crust, including under the ocean floor. It may pool beneath various formations, but it would still be widespread and even considered a renewable resource that is continually recharging at some rate. This may explain why some old oil wells never quite die.
As we need the CO2 for improved crop growth and yields due to the coming cooling, this is a great thing.
<<>>
Fine. Except “the Russian Scientistists” are very, very, wrong.
what about the natural gas reserves in Alaska? i thought there are hundreds of years of supply there. Bill Wattenburg and Bob Brinker have been advocating that the federal gov’t mandate that all new gov’t vehicles run on natural gas for a few years already even before these more recent shale gas developments. Is there any logical reason this doesn’t happen aside the politicians are owned by either oil or the greenies?
“IEA: Natural Gas Can Supply World For 250 Years”
Looking at Canada, shale gas will be negative EROEI within a few years on current production declines, they will be lucky if they can stretch the whole industry past a 20 yr lifespan from inception before it costs more energy to get it than is produced.
The IEA have looked at one part of the equation, an analogy would be to say “the sea water of the Earth’s oceans contain about 25 billion ounces of gold (Burk 1989)”
We’re rich! Buy Sea water!
Shale gas is enjoying a massive scale boiler room scam IMO. It will attract much investment, more bubble economics, before the inevitable reality strikes.
No Frosty – shale gas is not like gold in seawater – not anymore! Forty-five years ago, my dad told me the US oil shale formations dwarfed every other oil reserve in the world, but nobody knew an economical way to get it out. Jimmy Carter’s fiasco in Rifle, Colorado demonstrated nobody knew how to get it out. The Barnett, Hainsville and Bakken shale formations are now yielding oodles of gas and oil – through the combination of two techniques; deep horizontal boring and fracking. Neither of these technologies are mature, we are on a fast learning curve and these two techniques are rapidly improving. The silica sand used in the fracking process will be replaced with synthetic particles that have ideal specific gravities and can be pushed deeper into the fractures. 3m has patented some of those very recently. Fracking fluids are constantly tweaked and experimented with and both big and incremental improvements are the norm out there.
You and Murray are observing something that has been observed for a very, very, very long time in the oil patch. “The future looks grim for our ROI and these wells will soon run out of gas/oil.” But none of that changes the immensity of economically recoverable shale gas and oil. Its always hard to make money. Lots of money will be lost developing the shale formations in addition to lots of money being made. But if you don’t think these shale formations are a game changer; well, “there are none so blind as those who will not see”
Frosty says:
January 22, 2011 at 3:54 am
Shale gas is enjoying a massive scale boiler room scam IMO. It will attract much investment, more bubble economics, before the inevitable reality strikes.
Believe what you will. The number of wells drilled in the Marcellus Shale have gone from 27 in 2007 to 1,386 last year. That’s a huge investment in a “scam”. Oil companies must be really dumb, I guess.
Time will tell. There are ways to increase the productivity, by refracking, for example. Environmental concerns need to be addressed, of course, and will be. There will always be those with an agenda who will be willing to falsely attack what could be a very promising source of energy.
tmtisfree, January 21, 2011 at 5:34 am:
Thanks for the link:
Published Jan 20, 2011
Investors Abandon Green Energy after Huge New Gas and Oil Finds
http://www.suite101.com/content/investors-abandon-green-energy-in-wake-of-huge-new-gas-and-oil-fi-a335451
Which led to this link:
Brazil Oil Fields May Hold More Than Twice Estimates
By Peter Millard – Jan 19, 2011 (Bloomberg)
“Brazilian oil deposits below a layer of salt in the Atlantic Ocean hold at least 123 billion barrels of reserves, more than double government estimates, according to a university study by a former Petroleo Brasileiro SA geologist.”
“We started with a skeptical view and finished with bigger numbers,” Chaves said in an interview at the university in the city of Rio. “When we got the first results I said: ‘Something is wrong, it’s too big.’”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-19/brazil-oil-fields-may-hold-more-than-twice-estimated-reserves.html
And led to this link:
Huge source of oil, gas found in South China Sea, Monday 17th January, 2011 (China News.Net)
“Chinese geologists have detected ‘super-thick’ oil and gas-rich strata in the South China Sea and also identified 38 offshore oil and gas basins, a media report said Monday.”
http://www.chinanews.net/story/732538/ht/Huge-source-of-oil-gas-found-in-South-China-Sea
Hydrocarbons (crude oil and most natural gas) are a product of geological chemical formation: Oil is abiotic. So-called “peak” oil is a scam, just like AGW.
The cummulative facts & evidence is overwhelming.
The world’s supply of hydrocarbons is much greater than commonly understood (as the above linked reports demonstrate).
For more evidence of Abiotic Oil Theory (numerous articles, reports, and discussion):
http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2150
Bruce Cobb says:
January 22, 2011 at 5:12 am
“Believe what you will. The number of wells drilled in the Marcellus Shale have gone from 27 in 2007 to 1,386 last year. That’s a huge investment in a “scam””
The US consumes 20 trillion cubic feet of gas a year. At $4/mmbtu(1000 cubic feet) that makes gas an 80 billion dollar a year business.
There are a lot of legitimate people questioning whether $4/mmbtu price is a result of the recession or a reflection of the true costs of extraction.
Are all those wells being drilled on an expectation that gas prices will stay at $4/mmbtu or on an expectation that gas prices will rise to $8/mmbtu.
Well, I know more about shale, shale gas, oil shales and frac’ing than I do about climate change (though I know that climate changes constantly, and the apparent assumption that the climate of the sixties was the optimum climate and CO2 production will cause the end of civilization is crazy), so it is interesting to read the spectrum of opinion on shale gas in this thread. There are a number of professionals making comments, I can recognize them because I tend to agree with them that there is vast potential for gas production, and that horizontal drilling and frac’ing technology is a responsible and cost-effective way to exploit the resource. Some of the plays will lose money, but oil and gas companies have long memories but do keep trying new methods, and the price of the commodities will rise and fall, but tend to rise over the long term, so whichever shales can produce economically will ultimately do so.
Then there are the people who seem to get their information from investment bulletins, media and the internet, many have pertinent points and opinions, but some need to learn more about the technical and geological background involved in shale gas and the oil industry in general.
It’s very interesting to read the comments and compare them to comments on other threads that pertain to greenhouse gases, climate change and apocalyptic predictions. The calibre and range of accuracy of commentary on the different topics is likely about the same, I haven’t noticed if the same people are making the same type of remarks, but I suspect that someone who says that the earth’s core is “millions of degrees” will also claim that the sea level will rise 20 feet or more by the end of the century.
For the record:
I think the concept attributed to Russian scientists, of mantle-sourced hydrocarbons is highly unlikely; the earth underwent gravitational fractionation in the distant past, and carbon is mostly restricted to the crust. Lighter elements do get subducted, and volcanoes in the mid-ocean ridges far away from relatively recent subduction do emit CO2, but to hope for significant hydrocarbons coming from below the crust is futile.
Peak oil (and coal and gas) is likely, but new technology and increased commodity prices will tend to make it a long plateau rather than a peak with a rapid decline. This means countries should eventually invest in all viable means of energy extraction, production and conservation (possibly including semi-voluntary reduction in use through carbon taxes) that can be conceived, so that they will be able to maintain living standards in the future. The green scum CAGW demand that fossil fuel use be curtailed is economic and civilizational suicide by slow starvation. Their claim that projected CO2 production will cause climate catastrophe is not supportable. If the average temperature rises by a couple or few degrees, the world, humanity, and agriculture will be better for it. Natural systems will not notice and will adapt, erosion and deposition is constant along the coast, any corresponding sea-level rise will not change that process significantly.
Flask,
I appreciate your comments, however there are Abiotic Oil theories that don’t require oil to come from the mantel. There are theories that suggest hydrocarbons are formed in the crust:
An abiotic oil presentation made to the Houston Geological Society (principally concerned with oil & gas):
Cracks of the World: Global Strike-Slip Fault Systems and Giant Resource Accumulations, by Stanley B. Keith
http://www.hgs.org/en/art/?34
Keith’s resume:
Stanley B. Keith has over 30 years of successful exploration experience in minerals and energy. Upon earning BS and MS degrees in geology from the University of Arizona, he became a field and research geologist focused on mineralogy, geologic mapping, stratigraphy, tectonics, and isotopic age dating. At Kennecott and the Arizona Geological Survey in the mid-1970s he recognized an empirical relationship between mineral deposits and magma series.”
He [Keith] co-founded MagmaChem Exploration in 1983 for mineral exploration, working on numerous exploration and research projects for both mineral and energy exploration companies. Currently he is a founding researcher with Sonoita Geoscience Research, an industry-supported consortium that applies hydrothermal and economic geological theory and techniques to petroleum exploration.”
Well worth reading the link as apparently the program director of the HGS thought it would be worthwhile to have Keith make the presentation to the group.
Also from Stanley B. Keith:
Hydrothermal Hydrocarbons, Stanley B. Keith and Monte M. Swan
“We suggest a third possibility–the generation of methane and heavier hydrocarbons through reactions that occur during cooling, fractionation, and deposition of dolomitic carbonates, metal-rich black shales, and other minerals from hydrothermal metagenic fluids. These fluids are proposed to be the product of serpentinization of carbon-rich peridotites under hydrogen-rich, reduced conditions.”
http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/abstracts/2005research_calgary/abstracts/extended/keith/keith.htm
Apparently, the petroleum industry respects Keith and his associates enough so he can run an industry-supported consortium focussed on petroleum exploration based on abiotic oil theory.
Dig a little deeper and you find the oil industry engages in a lot of exploration & production consitent with Abioitic Oil Theory.
We’ve done the Abiotic Oil rave here before. I’ll pass this time around, but it is ironic that it surfaces in a thread on gas production by artificially fracturing organic shales.
Explain to me one more time how all those abiotic hydrocarbons leaked into those impermeable shales, rather than being original, in situ organic matter.
Doug. I would have to disagree with you about TOD. Perhaps you choose to disbelieve them because their message challenges your cherished paradigm. However they have numerous active oil industry contributors, they quantify and put in context their claims, they challenge each other’s analyses, and they cite cources. I have been following oil and gas closely as an investor and sometimes futures speculator for 14 years now, and I fine TOD quite credible.
The key to any discussion of oil and gas is quantification and context. The article you cite only provides 2 bits of quantification and no context. Gulf oil production up 12% in 10 years – thats about 190k b/d, or 0.1% of USA consumption. Bakken production “rocketing” to 350k b/d – WOW- 0.17% of USA daily consumption. Both are better than decline, but USA total production has declined 2-3%/yr since 1970, so about 170 mb/d in 2010. Over the last 5 years the Bakken rocket has offset maybe 40% of the USA decline – nice, but not a savior.
The O&GJ reports what individual producers supply them as info. OPEC reserves never decline, and haven’t for about 30 years, while OPEC has produced more than 300 Gb. Saudi Arabia has produced nearly 100 Gb in the last 30 years, has done very little new exploration, and has experienced no decline in reserves. Magic!! A couple of years ago Canada’s reserves shot up, because Canada reclassified tar sands as reserves, but they are reserves that cannot be produced rapidly. Flows matter more than stocks. Five years ago Canada projected tar sands production of 3mb/d by 2015. Now it is by 2020.
All liquids production has indeed gone up by 2 mb/d, with all of the increase being non-conventional liquids, with an EROEI much lower than conventional oil, and NGLs and ethanol having much lower energy/b than petroleum. Divide the barrels by 3 to get net energy equivalent.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Your optimism is touching but just can’t stand up to serious quantification and context. Murray
James F. Evans says:
“Dig a little deeper and you find the oil industry engages in a lot of exploration & production consitent with Abioitic Oil Theory.”
Sure, some companies have done exploration based on that, generally unsuccessfully, and Doug’s question about organic shales is the best reply. The oil industry has successfully used the organic source paradigm so far, some will investigate the mantle-sourced abiotic oil, and some will investigate Keith’s deep burial geochemical ideas. If there is any great success, those models will be copied, but I predict it will be nothing like the game change from shale gas.
Interesting in those reports you cited, the rates of movement and direction of various continents. I remember seeing elsewhere that Antarctica was moving westward (generally towards the Pacific, just west of South America), but it was moving slower than the other continents. That jives with some of Keith’s comments. The point is that Antarctica is isolated climatically as well, and that it will be very cold down there for a long time, geologically a long time, and I doubt if much ice will melt there any time soon. Possibly some from the West Antarctic ice sheet, but not the main accumulation.
Doug stated: “We’ve done the Abiotic Oil rave here before.”
I do recall and you failed to respond to more than once to various facts & evidence presented that support Abiotic Oil Theory.
But, Doug, your problem isn’t with me, it’s with Stanley B. Keith, a geologist with over 30 years experience “in the business” who runs an industry-supported consortium, Sonoita Geoscience Research, that uses Abiotic Oil Theory in their exploration work.
Dour stated: “Explain to me one more time how all those abiotic hydrocarbons leaked into those impermeable shales, rather than being original, in situ organic matter.”
First, the shale is not organic, in the sense that it’s entirely constituted of organic detritus. That is your assumption. It DOES have hydrocarbons in it, including methane, and a percentage of organic detritus, but, again, that does not make it “organic shale”.
That is not to say there isn’t any residual organic detritus contained within the shale, and, indeed, methane can form from organic detritus, but the bulk of the methane is not formed from organic detritus, instead, as Keith & Swanson describe it, the methane is a result of abiotic, mineral formation processes.
And, as Keith & Swan point out in their work, hydrocarbon bearing shale is likely formed as a result of “the generation of methane and heavier hydrocarbons through reactions that occur during cooling, fractionation, and deposition of dolomitic carbonates, metal-rich black shales, and other minerals from hydrothermal metagenic fluids.”
From Peridotites, Serpentinization, and Hydrocarbons, Keith & Swan:
“If the brines breech the hydrosphere they may produce “white smokers” (tuffa vent mounds/pinnacle reefs) along faults and enrich shales with exhalative metal and hydrocarbon.”
http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/2006/06088houston_abs/abstracts/keith.htm
In other words, the methane is embedded within the shale as the shale was deposed in the rock formation either as sediment or a dike formation.
So, to answer your question, the methane does not “leak” into “impermeable shales”, but is part and parcel of the shale as it is being deposed within the rock formation.
James Evans re Keith, Ghawar and hydrothermal dolomites – please see the following links. Oil companies spend billions of dollars per year on exploration and development, and have done so for many decades. Oil fields follow a clear pattern from large to small, and the large ones get found first. AFAIK no giant fields have been found since 2003. I seriously doubt that there is some new geology that has hitherto been overlooked. And it is very very unlikely that Ghawar can be called hydrothermal dolomite. Murray
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V6X-46KR7FV-2&_user=10&_coverDate=10%2F01%2F2002&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1616282962&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=7a062ff01e6f5fcda60bcc45984d6a64&searchtype=a
http://mgg.rsmas.miami.edu/faculty/pswart/swart%20et%20al%202005a.pdf
Gunther Dieckmann says:
January 21, 2011 at 10:14 am
“We need the world governments to be focused on technologies that can be scaled to the dimensions that will be needed in the future.”
Gunther, you are right about the need to research these technologies and fund the research with public money. What is wrong in my opinion is the huge amount of subsidies going into *installing* premature solutions, as we are doing now.
My sister had a patio paved with cut slabs of oil shale. It was full of fossils. It would kind of burn. It was flaky and was not ideal paving stone. It came out of the mother of all shale formations, the Green River.
Its not entirely organic? Well there is so much organic in it – ok, correlation ain’t causation, but I’m with Doug, I don’t think shale hydrocarbons are abiotic. I can’t stretch that far.
<<>>
Glad to see we have such knowledgeable people on this board. “It’s like that scene in “A Fish Called Wanda”( “I warn you, I used to box for Oxford” “Oooo, I used to kill for the CIA”) I have been finding and producing oil and gas for 30 years. My client list includes half the major oil companies. My wife worked for Saudi Aramco and Exxon research.
I never fails to be amazed at people who will latch onto some fringe ideas, be they from an internet site , some mining geologist trying to get funding from mainstream oil companies, an astrophysicist way out of his field, or some Russian who worked up unproductive theories in virtual academic isolation. They’ll preach until blue in the face, raving on about their remarkable insight.
Meanwhile, those of us clinging to our stale old paradigms continue to have access to all the best technology and data, continue to improve upon a vast body of solid science, and continue to keep the world fueled.
For entire history of the oil business, in spite of dire predictions, there have been adequate supplies. Those supplies, in spite of various fringe theories, can be linked to biotic sources. I suspect the next 30 years will be more of the same.
Flask presented Evans’ statement: “Dig a little deeper and you find the oil industry engages in a lot of exploration & production consitent with Abioitic Oil Theory.”
Flask then responded: “Sure, some companies have done exploration based on that, generally unsuccessfully…”
On the contrary, the ultra-deep water, ultra-deep oil found off the Brazilian coast is completely consistent with Abiotic Oil Theory, so is the ultra-deep Gulf of Mexico. But just as important, it completely contradicts the “oil window” theory of diagenesis and catagenesis because the oil is found deeper and hotter than what the so-called “oil window” theory would predict.
And, Brazil’s national oil company is finding huge amounts of oil. One giant field, Carioca, found just a couple of years ago, is thought to have as much as 33 billion barrels of oil.
And, this oil is as hot as 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
(Bloomberg) “Tapping what may be the biggest oil finds in the Western Hemisphere in three decades will require equipment that can withstand 18,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, enough to crush a pickup truck, pipes that can carry oil at temperatures above 500 degrees Fahrenheit (260 Celsius) and drill bits that can penetrate layers of salt more than one mile thick.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aalWn.eJHGZk&refer=latin_america
The same type of temperatures (45o degrees Fahrenheit) are found in the ultra-deep Gulf of Mexico oil deposits.
The so-called “oil window” posits that oil can’t form at higher than about 275 degrees Fahrenheit which was believed to happen deeper than 15,000 feet deep and/or would cause breakdown into methane above that temperature.
Flask stated: “The oil industry has successfully used the organic source paradigm so far…” Actually, it’s not the organic source paradigm that has increased the finding of oil (in the old days before 3D sonic) there was 27 “dry holes” for every successful one.
It is the ability to “see” the oil via sonic techniques, which are very successful.
But, to give Flask credit, as I’ve described how shale, often described as “source” rock, is part of the abiotic process, finding shale is likely to lead to oil.
Brazil Oil Fields May Hold More Than Twice Estimates
By Peter Millard – Jan 19, 2011 (Bloomberg)
“Brazilian oil deposits below a layer of salt in the Atlantic Ocean hold at least 123 billion barrels of reserves, more than double government estimates, according to a university study by a former Petroleo Brasileiro SA geologist.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-19/brazil-oil-fields-may-hold-more-than-twice-estimated-reserves.html
Flask, I’d say 123 billion barrels is very successful (admittedly this is more than one oil “field”, but, rather an oil bearing region off the coast of Brazil).
And Keith’s ideas are being followed all over the world (West Africa, ultra-deep Gulf of Mexico, Eastern Mediterranean gas and many others — mostly off-shore).
Murray Duffin, I appreciate the link and abstract, but that is about definitions. I agree definitions need to be tightened up, but in no way does that contradict or even address the physical theory which Keith presents. Also, remember Ghawar, Saudi Arabia, has been pumping since about 1951 and shows no sign of slowing down even after pumping a equivalent of a 19 mile cube of oil.
William Abbott, the Green River shale is, indeed, a deposit of shale formed from ancient lake sediments, but as I stated above, the hydrocarbons embedded within the shale, both ‘heavy’ hydrocarbons, H330C215, often called ‘kerogen’, and most of the methane is not formed from the organic detritus.
There simply isn’t enough heat & pressure to turn low chemical enery potential organic detritus into high chemical energy potential ‘heavy’ hydrocarbon kerogen.
It runs afoul of the second law of thermodynamics, the law of increasing entropy.
Kerogen and most of the methane are products of mineralogical formation.
Doug, you don’t respond to facts & evidence presented.
Offshore magazine is the premiere trade publication for offshore oil exploration & development. In the January 2010 edition they have a very good article on oil exploration & development in the Gulf of Mexico:
Lower Tertiary play: Is it Gulf of Mexico’s final frontier
http://www.offshore-mag.com/index/article-display/7102345141/articles/offshore/volume-70/issue-1/gulf-of_mexico/lower-tertiary_play.html
Some sceptics might say, “sure, you make it sound like Abiotic Oil, but that’s your take, what do the insiders have to say about all this ultra-deep water, ultra-deep drilling?”
The article gives a good account of what insiders within the oil industry have to say:
“Just as the voyagers of the science fiction Starship Enterprise probed the outer reaches of space to reveal new worlds, oil and gas exploration teams, working in the real world, have boldly gone where no one has gone before to discover giant fields in the deepest reaches of the Gulf of Mexico. They have taken a peek at billions of barrels of potential reserves. There are no Klingons to battle, but the operators and service companies will have to deploy next-generation technologies, some still in design and development, to overcome the greatest risks the industry has encountered to date. The technology challenges include extreme water and target depths, seismically dense salt canopy, low-porosity and low-permeability reservoirs, and high-pressure/high-temperature (HP/HT) downhole conditions.”
The development of safety technology, which regrettably has lagged behind, has to be increased to the level of the exploration & production technology.
The above quoted passage from Offshore magazine is the lead paragraph of the story and it gives a preview of what the oil industry is up to in ultra-deep water, ultra-deep drilling.
First we know it is huge:
“The Lower Tertiary play could be as wide as 300 mi (483 km) and involve as many as 3,000 blocks,” according to the Minerals Management Service (MMS) Gulf of Mexico Regional Director Lars Herbst.”
“Potential reserve estimates for the Lower Tertiary play vary wildly from 3 to 15 Bboe because much of the play remains untested. A better gauge of value can be discerned from the capacity of some of the production facilities currently under construction or in engineering design…”
I have previously discussed the high temperature & pressure of the oil deposits:
“Bottomhole pressure in the Lower Tertiary wells is expected to exceed 20,000 psi (138 MPa) and the temperature to exceed 400° F (204° C). Current technology can accommodate either high pressure or high temperature. With both high pressure and high temperature, the completion equipment has to be redesigned, possibly with new higher strength, low-corrosion metals and elastomers as higher temperature also increases corrosion effects. A similar redesign process is under way for extreme-condition packers and cementing equipment.”
“Our customers in the Lower Tertiary play routinely encounter depths below 20,000 ft (6,096 m) and pressures above 20,000 psi, making it is necessary to use high-density fluids for reducing surface treating pressures,” explains Richard Vaclavik, GoM Region vice president, Halliburton.”
The deep waters of the Gulf of mexico were not always looked at favorably by the oil companies:
“Subsequently in the early 2000s, few geologists expected to find significant oil traps in the Lower Tertiary. The skeptics have been proven wrong with the discovery of long Lower Tertiary oil pay zones. These discoveries will require development efforts of several decades. Will the operators then discover another frontier beyond the Lower Tertiary in the abyssal depths of greater than 12,000 ft (3,658 m) in the Sigsbee Deep?”
This is because the physical conditions violate the so-called “oil window” theory as previously discussed in my prior comment.
The fact that the author of the story would even ask about “abyssal depths of greater than 12,000 ft (3,658 m) in the Sigsbee deep” suggests oil companies are seriously considering that possibility. Also, there is more evidence to suggest the oil companies are serious beyond the say so of this story’s author.
It’s not what the oil companies say, it’s what they do: Actions speak louder than words:
“With five-year drilling contracts from Chevron in hand, Transocean has placed into service two ultra deepwater drillships built to the operator’s specifications. The Discoverer Clear Leader began drilling operations in August 2009. The second vessel, Discoverer Inspiration, is scheduled for delivery in early 2010. Both drillships are capable of drilling in 12,000 ft (3,658 m) of water to a total depth of 40,000 ft (12,192 m), exceeding the limitations of existing rigs.”
“In December 2008, Baker Hughes inaugurated its Center for Technology Innovation (CTI) in Houston. The primary focus of this facility is to develop next-generation completion and production tools for HP/HT conditions typically found in the Lower Tertiary wells. “The CTI is capable of testing full-size prototypes of the next generation of completion and production equipment in a test environment with gas pressure up to 40,000 psi and temperature up to 700° F (371° C),” says Rustom Mody, Baker Hughes vice president of Technology.”
Research & development for oil deposits as high in temperature as 700 degrees Fahrenheit, and twice the pressures currently encountered, it strongly suggests the oil majors think there is oil much deeper than is even presently being located at, likely deeper than 30,000 feet below the bottom of the seabed (Mount Everest is 29,000 ft above sea level).
No micro-organisms in those conditions or no ancient shallow lake beds either.
The so-called “oil window” theory has not just been soundly contradicted, it has been blown out of the water!