Posted on 12/20/2024 2:24:20 PM PST by JeepersFreepers
Guessing Big Oil companies are happy to see the investments forced by fedgov will not turn into losses because of Trump admin.
I was wondering how the regulation whipsaw would be ‘fixed’ and now I know.
the energy transition mind virus concocted by consulting firms will catch big oil out eventually, just not right now.
So what happened to directional drilling and fracking.....inquiring minds see to know.
They die faster.
A quick lesson in oil. Rock has 2 parameters. Porosity and Permeability. Porosity is the pores in the rock, which will hold ancient water and oil.
Permeability is the interconnectedness of pores. How close they are together. How easy they connect to each other.
In conventional oil, you drill down and hit a spot, found via seismic imagery, that has lots of pores and when the wellbore hits that spot, its open route to the sky has a great deal less pressure in it than the rock pores being pressed down on by 2 miles of rock above it. So the oil flows to the wellbore and up and out . . . gusher.
When those pores around the bore empty, the pressure difference snaps the thin rock between pores and enables that interconnection. Gusher.
If the rock has low permeability, not much interconnectedness, then you can drill down, turn horizontal along that layer, and inject high pressure within the bore. This fractures the rock around it and creates artificial permeability.
Oil flows, but because it is artificial permeability, the fracturing is not very far out from the wellbore. Those pores empty out and that’s that. That well is done.
All sorts of things are done to keep it flowing . . . re-fracking etc, but reality is “shale wells drill horizontal and they die vertically”. The curve on the graph of their production goes up steeply and down even more steeply. Vertical death of the well.
Shale wells start about 800 barrels/day. They drop 40% in year 1. Then 30%, then 20%. They are dead in 5-10 yrs and must plug and abandon. Versus conventional (not frack) wells like in Saudi Arabia. Their wells take decades to die.
Forgot to say . . . conventional wells (like Saudi Arabia) can flow 15,000 barrels/day. Far, far superior to frack/shale.
YES - WE NEED CLOSED PRIMARIES !
(was off here a couple days, THANKS though!)
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