[ROCKMAN]

It wasn't Dog that foresakin' that place...it was the Dept of Transportation. It was just fine before them damn oil patch bastards started mucking it up.

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'I') don't see how the Trans-Alaskan pipeline ... will be maintained, much less upgraded with heaters or flow control.

[ennui2]

Planty's been pretty silent in this thread.

I'd like to see if he's celebrating this decline or not, considering how much he supposedly cares about global warming.

[Tanada]

I know Russia has ice breaking tanker ships, I have seen video somewhere on Youtube of them arriving and leaving an off shore loading facility surrounded by ice. How much will it cost for the USA to build the same kind of ships and facility to keep getting oil from the North Slope when volumes are too low to use the TAPS?

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'Y')ou'd also have to imagine some kind of oil terminal to load those ships. With harbor, marina, port, dry dock, support infrastructure, etc. Maybe the Russians built that stuff when there was lot of oil. We chose the pipeline instead. Probably too late to go back.

[Alaska_geo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PeakOiler', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'W')hat good is the long tail if it is frozen tight in an abandoned pipeline?

[PeakOiler]

Here's an updated graph with data through Jan. 2016:



Last year the minimum rate was 390 tbpd. Anyone care to guess what this year's minimum rate will be?

vtsnowedin guessed 340 last year. I guessed 367. This year I will make a guess of 375 tbpd.

[Tanada]

Looking at that graph it seems like flows have plateaued in the usual bumpy fashion from mid 2012 to present. I remember they were doing a lot of field work, updating equipment, exploiting smaller known deposits and stuff like that. Any idea how long they can hold production around these levels?

[PeakOiler]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'L')ooking at that graph it seems like flows have plateaued in the usual bumpy fashion from mid 2012 to present. I remember they were doing a lot of field work, updating equipment, exploiting smaller known deposits and stuff like that. Any idea how long they can hold production around these levels?

[PeakOiler]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'L')ooking at that graph it seems like flows have plateaued in the usual bumpy fashion from mid 2012 to present. I remember they were doing a lot of field work, updating equipment, exploiting smaller known deposits and stuff like that. Any idea how long they can hold production around these levels?

[PeakOiler]

Here's the updated graph with data through April:



I was a little surprised that production went down, or stayed about the same, this April, compared to previous Aprils the last few years.

[PeakOiler]

Updated graph with data through May:



490 tbpd was May's number.

[PeakOiler]

No sine wave here...

[MD]

Alaska is still about about an aging pipeline, and the difficulties in maintaining a cost effective flow of resource through it. One day, perhaps soon, costs will outweigh benefits, and it will stop.

The only way to save it is by developing new flows. So far they are still out of reach.

It's "simple" math...

[PeakOiler]

Updated graph with data through June:



June production was 455 kbpd.

[ROCKMAN]

"...the better you do the job at exploiting this oil and I gas, the sooner it is gone." Which adds even more irony in regions like the Permian Basin where much of the horizontal drilling that produced higher rates were wells drilled in fully developed fields. Thus much of the recovery from these new wells would have evevtuly been produced by the original vertical wells. Difficult to quantify but it did accelerate the ultimate abandonment date to some degree.