[frankthetank]

I might just rip all that fuel injection crap out of my car an install one of these...if there blessed by Jesus Christ himself, they gotta work

[Ayoob_Reloaded]

So how much gasoline type stuff can you get out of a given volume of oil shale at a density to be named later?

And I gotta get one of those Jesurators.

[The_Virginian]

pardon my ignorance, but is it nor possible to achieve higher efficiency with vaporization of the benzine ?

I had read about some carborators that successfuly did that, but they were large and expensive to outfit, so it never made "standard equipment."

One thing about a carborator, you can clean it/adjust it yourself w/o a computer....

I miss my fiat 127

[stu]

One argument that goes against Peak Oil is the market force theory- As the price goes up new technology will evolve and solve the problem.

I never knew what this technology was or how it would work but fortunately I know now what the basics of it are thanks to a magazine that my friend showed me in a Swedish science magazine.

It shows a flow chart with oil production actually meeting the 125mbpd expected in 2030.

If anyone out there can translate Swedish the article should be at www.illustreradvetenskap.com

According to the article there are three basic methods.

1. Lateral Drilling.

This basically involves drilling down and then horizontally. Confused.

This article helps to explain it. Registration needed but it is worth it.

Texas companies turn to hard-to-pump heavy oil as light oil declines in Alaska

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')rilling for heavy oil used to involve a straight shot, one hole that went down 4,000 to 5,000 feet and opened up 75 to 100 feet of oil-laden sands. For viscous to make economic sense, more area needs to be available off the main hole. That's where lateral drilling comes in. A well with three to five laterals can open up 25,000 feet of sand.

Computer-driven drill bits that snake through the sandstone, going from one pocket of oil to the next, also are taking much of the guesswork out of drilling. Technicians can now keep a drill bit within bands of sand only 10 to 15 feet thick 90 percent of the time, extend out 1.5 miles, and still hit a target within about the size of a large door frame.

[stu]

A link about SAGD (Steam assisted gravity drainage) technology.

[leal]

Hi
Do you know in which issue the article was in? I did some searches and found one in 6/2005 but couldn't read it since I am not an subscriber
I could only read the abstract and it is a bit confusing.

It says that we have 3345 billion barrels of oil which we have used 717 billion, 1150 is within easy access and 1450 is hard to access.

As you can the numbers doesn't match, 717 + 1150 + 1450 < 3345 and why include the 717 used to begin with? The only reason I can see is to calm people, we have only used 20 % That over 40 % is hard to access is stated with small letters... One conclusion based on the these tiny facts is that we soon have used half of the easily accessible oil, depending how to define easily of cause. Shouldn't the peak be around that point?

[PhilBiker]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')his involves drilling a hole next to the actual well and then injecting it with steam to increase the pressure and 'lighten' the heavy oil. This is being done as we speak I think. Maybe the economists believe that with more money they can use more natural gas to inject more steam and thus obtain more of the unreachable heavy oil. That really won't solve much in the long run with a natural gas peak looming.

[JoeGreene]

I buy a house with an inground swimming pool filled with dirty water. I rent
a pump to remove the liquid so I can clean and refill.

If the volume of ugly liquid pumped out were measured with time, would its removal rate
graph in a bell shape?

If not, how does that differ from an oil well?

[khebab]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')f not, how does that differ from an oil well?

[Geology_Guy]

The oil field has several problems that your swimming pool does not have. For one-where is the oil field located? Where should the pumps be placed? You will have to guess at first so your extraction rate might be on the low side. After a few tries you will hit the field and production goes up, but an oil field is not rectagular. Did you miss some funny shaped corners? Throw a few more pumps in the corners, but your production will not be as high as from those lucky wells which hit the middle.

How will you get the last few dozen gallons of water out of the swimming pool? The last few gallons are always trouble.

[RonMN]

The water at the surface of your pool is no different than at the bottom. Toss in a bunch of dirt to form mud at the bottom & yes...the extraction would be very much like an oil field.

[shakespear1]

If I stick a well in the middle of the field this well will only produce within its DRAINAGE RADIUS.

DR will be a lot smaller than your field (that is why we need amny wells).

Drainage radius depends on permeability ( ease with which fluid flows through the formation/reservoir).

The Initial Reservoir Pressure helps you move the oil toward the well. The driving force is equal to the pressure away from the well minus the pressure at the well. As the pressure away from the well decreases you need to lower the pressure more to drive the fluid toward you at the well.

Initialy you just open the well ( lower pressure ) and the oil comes. With time the reservoir pressure drops ( like a balloon deflating ) and at some point you need to install a pump to artificially lower this pressure. Now you need to buy electricity and the equipment to do this.

Now that barrel of oil that is far away (500m) does not see the same pressure drop that a barrel that is 100 m away from the well. Hence it is harder to get the far away oil to move toward you. The pressure profile looks like a Normal Yield Curve for Bonds. Hell it even makes sense $$ wise. More buck to get the far away oil.

Thus the oil field and a well is nothing like a swiming pool as the fluid in it has no great resistence to flow toward the pump inlet.

Put in an aquarium pump with molasses in the pool and then you wil be closer to the truth.

[MD]

You have all missed the main misconception.

An oil field is not an open cavern filled with liquid. It is a rock sponge with cracks. A sponge you cannot squeeze to extract the liquid. The liquid within the sponge moves very slowly, sometimes hardly at all.

Image your pool filled with a mesh of very small containers the size of shot glasses, or ping pong balls. Image pin holes that allow fluid to pass from one shot glass to another. Now in order to drain your dirty pool, you need to drill through the shot glasses to the bottom. Initially you will get a lot of water from the glasses all around the bore, with additional water flowing in to the bore through the pin holes.

Now your swimming pool looks a lot more like an oil field.

Pumping from a cavity looks like a trapeziod, not a bell curve. The rate is dependent on the pump capacity, not the dynamics of the reservoir.

This is why Ghawar, even though it has huge amount of oil in place, only pumps at a fast rate from the north end where the rock has "big holes"...the south does not.

This is also why many fields never produce at very high rates and require hundreds of well bore that only produce a few barrels a day instead of hundreds of thousands.

The truly big gushers are rare, and nearly gone. This is the core peak oil problem.

[MD]

I should have read previous posts more carefully, my points were already made. The shot glass illustration will hopefully help build understanding.

[MD]

And the mollasses and aquarium pump illustration

[bobcousins]

Apart from permeability, the other key thing is that in an oilfield you don't drill just one well. You start with one well, then if successful you drill another. This allows you to grow production rate. Additionally with the money from the first well, you can hire more drilling rigs, so your production rate increases at a higher rate.

After a while you reach diminishing returns, because you risk drilling into depletion zone of previous wells, and factors such as reducing reservoir pressure and limited flow rate. So you stop drilling wells. After a while, all the wells start to drop off in production rate.

Now if you add up all the production rates from individual wells, this is what gives you the classic bell shape - actually a logistic curve (bell implies a distribution curve which is mathematically different).

The similarity with the logistic curve is a byproduct of how oilfields are exploited - a combination of geology and economics. Theoretically, if you identified where all the oil is, drilled all the wells you were ever going to, then only when all were ready, started extracting oil, the production would not look like a bell shape. But in practice no one actually does this.

It would be nice to have a simple analogy to illustrate an oilfield, but in practice there is really nothing else like it. If you can imagine an underground container filled with shot glasses connected by pinholes, you can probably image an underground reservoir of oil held in porous rock.

[JoeGreene]

Thanks, I now understand the up-ramp in oil production! Here's a related set of questions for the other side of the curve.

With pressure injection, I suppose oil is pushed towards extraction points. I would imagine this would alter the curve, perhaps resulting in a steeper decline. Do we have new data and curves that reflect these methods? If so, what percentage of wells are affected?

[shakespear1]

If the injection scheme works then your LIQUID production will suddenly start to see more OIL besides the water you have been producing so far. The injected water is pushing oil toward the well that before you could not reach because it was too far the pressure drop your producing well was generating.

HOWEVER, and this depends on characteristics of the oil and water ( think mollasses, vegetable oil, engine oil, in terms of flow characteristics of the particular oil in the ground ) , the velocity with which the bank of oil is moving and the water front behind it may become unstable ( mobility ratio ) and then the water will break through the oil bank.

When this happens you have a problem as more water will be coming toward you producing well. Once this break through is createded it may not reversable without changing the injection scheme etc etc.

I saw russian fields that were producing 90 % water and rest oil !!!!!! They were clueless in what they were doing as they were not thinking ENERGY COST. Yes you get a little bit of oil, but the cost of pumping all that water makes the whole think idiotic. On top of this, to continue to do this does not help overall, you are waisting ENERGY you put into the ground ( through INJECTORS ). To optimize this you need to simulate and this their 40 - 50 year old geologist ( think petroleum engineer in Russia ) did not know and had no software to do. We came in and started this for them. Smart people ( the young ) but they need outside knowhow to start the ball rolling.

What I am trying to say is that INJECTION is not an IDEAL PISTON DISPLACEMENT process. Again we have a panc down and need to respect Mother Nature.

[clv101]

Have a look at Chris Skrebowski's presentation here: http://www.odac-info.org/PeakOilUKConfe ... edings.htm
He has lots of production curves for North Sea oil fields, these have used advanced technology and the rapid ramp up and subsequent decline is clear

[spot5050]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('khebab', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')f not, how does that differ from an oil well?