‘Easy’ oil is gone says editor of the Oil and Gas Journal

Sometime in the ’70s, the state geologist of Pennsylvania warned that the birthplace of oil was about to run out of the black gold.

“That was the 1870s,” the Texas state geologist, Scott Tinker, said Monday, delivering the punch line in a joke about the oil industry’s short-sightedness.

More than 130 years later, the world is still drilling wherever it can, including in the newly popular Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and adjacent states.

“The energy density in gasoline is unlike anything else — that’s why we keep looking for fuel in liquids,” Tinker said.

And that’s why the future of oil extraction is still bright if expensively challenging, Tinker said shortly after his keynote talk at the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ 17th annual Improved Oil Recovery Symposium. The biannual event, which ends Wednesday, is bringing energy explorers and educators from around the world to the Renaissance Tulsa Hotel and Convention Center.

Tinker was joined in Monday’s opening session by SPE President Behrooz Fattahi, a heavy-oil expert for Aera Energy LLC of Bakersfield, Calif.

Fattahi believes that the energy industry faces challenges from government regulation, public perception and financial forces.

But he does not adhere to the concept of “peak oil” — the idea that the world is on a downward slope when it comes to fossil fuels in the ground. Trillions of barrels of oil, whether it’s heavy oil in Canadian sand formations or in tight rocks, remain untouched, he said.

The only peak lurking is whether great minds and adventurous investors are willing to work together and produce it, drilling proponents say.

“The easy oil is gone,” Fattahi said. “Now we really have to get in there and bring the oil to the surface in a hard way.”

That’s why events such as this week’s conference are important, he said. Petroleum academics and industry geologists need to brainstorm for the next “game changer,” such as when horizontal drilling or hydraulic fracturing was developed years ago, he said.

Tinker agreed, noting that the energy industry can often be “short-sighted” in how it handles both success and failure such as up-and-down oil pricing. Tinker, who is also the director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas, is working on a feature-length documentary about global energy that he hopes to show later this year.

The oil and gas industry has an image problem that dates back decades, despite the philanthropic and volunteer environmental efforts of many participants, Tinker and Fattahi said. They must combat negative news stories, perceived one-sided documentaries such as Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” and others who decry energy usage and fly back home in their private jets, they said.

“There are misconceptions and unfair portrayals of our industry,” Fattahi said. “But we’re producing something that society is asking for.”

The symposium also includes such insider topics as polymer degradation, interwell connectivity and emulsion flooding of heavy oils. Tuesday’s noon luncheon speaker will be Bob Tippee, the longtime editor of the Oil and Gas Journal and a former Tulsan.

Industry ideas that seem risky today can eventually become innovations that bring affordable oil to the general public, the speakers said.

“We don’t have a game changer yet,” Fattahi said. “And we won’t have it unless we meet in conferences like this to talk about it.”

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