[mekrob]

So if it will be too thick and viscous to get through the pipeline, then what is the point of recovering it. Do Japan and China have spare capacity for heavy oil, because I don't think Alaska has many refineries at all?

[Geko45]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he DOE said 89 billion barrels could potentially be added to current proved U.S. oil reserves of 21.9 billion barrels

[rockdoc123]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')o if it will be too thick and viscous to get through the pipeline, then what is the point of recovering it. Do Japan and China have spare capacity for heavy oil, because I don't think Alaska has many refineries at all?

[Leanan]

There's some discussion of this at The Oil Drum. Bubba, their resident oil industry insider, had this to say:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')y company has screened all the world's fields for their CO2 flood potential. The list of good candidates is small. Their first has to be a cheap, reliable source of high pressure, high volume CO2. Then the reservoir and reservoir fluids have to exist in the right pressure and temperature conditions and have the right composition. The reservoir needs to be susceptible to pattern flooding (i.e. a good waterflood candidate usually makes a good CO2 flood candidate). Lastly the fiscal conditions have to be such that companies would be willing to invest very large sums of money with the prospect of making a profit many years in the future.

[MicroHydro]

This is exactly what the "doomers" predicted, that on the downslope of oil depletion, lower and lower EROEI techniques will be used to produce increasingly expensive oil at ever decreasing rates.

[mekrob]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rockdoc123', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')o if it will be too thick and viscous to get through the pipeline, then what is the point of recovering it. Do Japan and China have spare capacity for heavy oil, because I don't think Alaska has many refineries at all?

[The_Toecutter]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')his is exactly what the "doomers" predicted, that on the downslope of oil depletion, lower and lower EROEI techniques will be used to produce increasingly expensive oil at ever decreasing rates.

[InformedEJ]

HHmm sounds like the DOE has read a little bit of Beyond Oil by Kenneth S. Deffeyes. An additional 89 billion.. at what cost and how long is this suppose to last. If they read further into the book they would realize that although "Diamond Compacting" Using "Coil tubing"and "Directional Drilling", these are great and New and Improved LOL... they are not in time to save the USA economy

[Eli]

Well I think it sounds very promising really.

The fact is that to create the Co2 for injection you have to use coal gasification or Integrated Combined Coal Gasification(ICCG). The CO2 is just a byproduct of the production of Syngas and liquid fuels.

The original reason to do coal gasification is for the production of Syngas. The Co2 is a byproduct. When Ng goes over 9.00 bucks Syngas will becomes profitable and so does the whole ICCG process. The nice thing about ICCG is that it also removes all the Sulfur from the coal in a form that is much easier to handle, coal is everywhere but a lot of times the sulfur content is too high to burn without expensive scrubbers.

It will be cheaper for power companies to build ICCGs rather than retrofit existing power plants with co2 and sulfur scrubbers.

Here is a link to a plant started back in the 70s

Look at the products page. Hey it is Sunday let your doom rating go up for once.

But I do see one big down side, what if there is a leak? You have tons and tons of co2 under pressure that comes shooting out of the ground at a high rate that could kill people pretty quick.

[DesertBear2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he DOE said 89 billion barrels could potentially be added to current proved U.S. oil reserves of 21.9 billion barrels

[mekrob]

I don't really see any deviation in this statement. We have 20 something billion barrels left. We produce like 5 mpd which is about 1.8 bby which would give us a little more than a decade, but with decreased production, probably more like 15 to 20 years. This is a very low estimate. There is no way that we would stop producing in less than 20 years. I've seen that what's left is something like 150 billion barrels. So don't these 80 billion just fit into those other 130? Or are they saying this is on top of that 150ish

[Eli]

You guys forget that coal wet gas was also called town gas because every town would have a plant to make gas for streets lights and such.

There is going to be a power down that is for sure but Coal gasification is going to help soften the blow. Deffeyes talks about it as being a viable option to help smooth things out.

[GoIllini]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'O')nce again we see a a high-tech solution in isolation that only prolongs the peak and steepens the decline. This scheme implies on-site gasification and distribution at an unimaginable cost in money, input-energy, time and a consequent loss of proft and eroei. Furthermore it would steal efforts and resources for more productive efforts (such as powerdown, localization, conservation, mass transit, etc.).

[The_Virginian]

Bah humbug.

First Occidental Petroleum is doing it already on a large scale. Second, whe the price of oil goes up, more high production cost assets/oil becomes available, but they are not cheap...exactly as Cambell et al. have been prediciting (with straight logic I might add).

[web]http://www.oxy.com/OIL_GAS/technology/tech_overview.htm[/web]

[pedalling_faster]

this sounds like the kind of news they put on page 1 of the newspaper to reassure the stock markets & to slow the crash.

i'm not saying it doesn't work. the more (useful) tools in the tool-basket, the better.

[DesertBear2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')or example, Occidental's Permian operations utilize CO2 flood technology in certain fields while using water flood and electric submersible pumps (ESP) in others. In Oman, Occidental drills multilateral horizontal wells based on 3D seismic interpretation and recovers the inplace oil with gas reinjection and waterflood technology. In Qatar, Occidental continues to increase recovery rates in the ISND and ISSD offshore fields by applying advanced technolgies.

[rockdoc123]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')his isn't new stuff. The multiple well bores, horizontal drilling, 3D seismic, and gas/water injection have been around for a long time. This isn't brand new rocket-science that is going to revolutionize oil production.

I was at Prudhoe Bay in 1981 and most of the wells in the oilfield were drilled using directional drilling technology and multiple well bores. The horizontal drilling was used heavily in the later 1980s around the US. And the 3D seismic has also been around for quite a while.