Maybe we should get Mexicans to drill for oil that Americans won't drill.
Posted on 03/04/2007 9:49:46 PM PST by neverdem
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — The Kern River oil field, discovered in 1899, was revived when Chevron engineers here started injecting high-pressured steam to pump out more oil. The field, whose production had slumped to 10,000 barrels a day in the 1960s, now has a daily output of 85,000 barrels.
In Indonesia, Chevron has applied the same technology to the giant Duri oil field, discovered in 1941, boosting production there to more than 200,000 barrels a day, up from 65,000 barrels in the mid-1980s.
And in Texas, Exxon Mobil expects to double the amount of oil it extracts from its Means field, which dates back to the 1930s. Exxon, like Chevron, will use three-dimensional imaging of the underground field and the injection of a gas — in this case, carbon dioxide — to flush out the oil.
Within the last decade, technology advances have made it possible to unlock more oil from old fields, and, at the same time, higher oil prices have made it economical for companies to go after reserves that are harder to reach. With plenty of oil still left in familiar locations, forecasts that the world’s reserves are drying out have given way to predictions that more oil can be found than ever before.
In a wide-ranging study published in 2000, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that ultimately recoverable resources of conventional oil totaled about 3.3 trillion barrels, of which a third has already been produced. More recently, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy consultant, estimated that the total base of recoverable oil was 4.8 trillion barrels. That higher estimate — which Cambridge Energy says is likely to grow — reflects how new technology can tap into more resources.
“It’s the fifth time to my count that we’ve gone through a period when it seemed the end of...”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I sure hope we can all afford the offsets made payable to Al Gore's company... for whatever it is they do.
And with politically popular price controls that never would have happened.
On January 31, 2006, we completed a $248 million acquisition of three producing oil properties that we believe have up to 80 MMBbls of potential recoverable oil reserves through tertiary CO2 flooding
The magic of human ingenuity and free market capitalism on display.
WE ARE DOOMED!!!...oh no wait...
"The magic of human ingenuity and free market capitalism on display."
High pressure steam is very old oil field secondary recovery technology. I imagine the current methods are much better than several decades back. But it costs money.
So high oil prices make these old, depleted reservoirs profitable again. You are correct.
And there are several other secondary (even tertiary) recovery technologies, all of which cost a lot more than primary recovery (which is simply the pressure in the reservoir, aided sometimes by a pump-on the surface or down in the well bottom).
Maybe we should get Mexicans to drill for oil that Americans won't drill.
Traits that liberals hate.
There is potentially as much as 200-500 billion barrels of oil in N Dakota and Montana in the Bakken shale formation. It's not shale oil like that trapped in shale rock in Colorado but is instead contained in narrow shale rock formations that make it difficult to obtain. However, as long as the price of oil remains high it's viable and is currently being exploited.
Afterwards, we're back to dependency on Middle East oil, though. (And all THAT brings). :-(
I don't see why we should be. There are more known reserves in and around North America than there is in the entire Middle East and North Africa. The President could sink a well from the White House driveway, and stand a good chance of finding a profitable gas field.
Compressed air is not an energy source, only a energy storage medium, similar to a battery. Some other fuel source is providing the energy to compress the air.
bump
I'd like to see this type of innovation used in the Oil City PA area. The economy in the area sure needs a boost.
Everything old is new again.
As thackney said, the compressed air is an energy storage medium, whereas oil and petrol products are combusibles, or sources of energy that we can tap into after (relatively) little work done to them.
The compressor that compresses the air probably requires 5 times the amount of energy (in the form of electricity or gas) than is released from the compressed air. And if it's an electric compressor, that electricity would come from coal or nuclear.
Now, it would be great if you could have a windmill directly cranking a compressor that would compress the air tank in a car, but the transfer method would be pretty difficult to implement.
The energy problem is a very complex one and it's important to remember that the oil companies would invest in something if it was economical. They're not married to oil in the sense that they would take a loss just to hold a monopoly. If solar had a huge breakthrough and was 50% efficient, you can bet that Shell, ExxonMobil, etc would jump on the bandwagon. BP already has a solar branch.
We've been doing C02 floods and steam floods since before I got into the business, whenever that was. I think Garfield was President at the time.
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