Thanks for the info Joe. I am still amazed at the information other FReepers are able too provide on such varied subjects.
My point was we have much more Oil in the ground that anyone would have ever thought we had just ten Years ago.
I have a very Liberal B-I-L. Whenever we discuss Big Oil, which he loves to do since he hates them like crazy, he insists we have less than a 50 Year Supply of Evil Petroleum.
When I correct him, he stares in disbelief. I can only attribute his refusal to accept the truth as his having an aversion to Googling it.
Back to the topic at hand, we aren’t at the mercy of OPEC like we used be. It is Economics, not the fact that the Reserves aren’t there for the taking if we choose to do so.
In other words, our wonderful Government in action.
Some of the advancements are just a matter of getting someone in the office to okay further investigation of unanticipated pay zones (fun companies to work for, because you get to find oil others missed or overlooked), sometimes, it takes major advancements in technology--both in the oil patch and in other sectors as well--it would be very difficult, if not impossible to drill the horizontal wells we drill today without a small truckload of computers on the drill site.
But I have a book in my office entitled "When the Oil Runs Out", warning of dire situations from oil shortages in the immediate future, published in 1947. I keep it as a reminder that panic is no stranger to humans, and that there is always more. It might be harder to find, more expensive to get, but it is there.
The area where I have worked most of my career (The Williston Basin) had not had oil discovered yet when that book was published (that discovery came in the 1950s), and while we knew there was oil in its now most famous formation (the Bakken), the ability to extract that oil was limited to a few vertical wells which intersected natural fracture systems.
Finally, some intrepid folks in the exploration departments of a few oil companies started looking, then drilling horizontal wells in the Bakken (the first round were failures), then over a decade later, some different folks tried again with a little different plan: Don't drill the shale, but drill the adjacent low permeability reservoir rocks and frac them.
Not long after that was succeeding wildly over in Eastern Montana (Richland County), some very successful wells in North Dakota spurred the expansion of drilling into deeper parts of the Basin in North Dakota, which went from the 8th ranked oil producing state to second.
I had the good fortune to work one of those vertical Bakken wells in 1980, missed out on the first round of horizontal wells in the mid 80s, but started working horizontal wells in 1990.
I was working for a smaller oil company in 2000 when I saw what people were talking about drilling horizontal wells in in the Bakken in a well in Eastern Montana, and the company came back (because that vertical well was successful in another, deeper zone) and twinned the well and we drilled their first Bakken horizontal well in 2001.
From there, things slowly went nuts, and by 2006 we were drilling in North Dakota, the company sold to a larger oil company, and, in short order, that company was bought by one of the Majors.
It was a fascinating time to be working in the oil patch.
Consider we adapted from the days of drafting vertical well logs on velum and lettering with LeRoy sets to working with computers at over ten times the drill rate of the earlier wells, (From 300 ft. per day to 3000 ft. per day in the Paleozoic rocks.), and from driving 70 miles to the nearest phone to satellite communications and internet, there have been a lot of changes along the way.
There will be more in the future, too, some moving forward, others rediscovering the techniques that led to the discovery of oil in today's target formations, but all in all, there is more oil out there and we are always looking for the 'next big play'.