I've been studying the UK Oil production


and I think that it has several interesting analogies to the World oil
production.

1) Both have a premature and clear peak (World in 1980 and UK in
1985). The absolute peak for the UK was in 1999. Although the world probably hasn't done its absolute peak
yet it will soon.

2) After the premature peak both had an important incident, that
was not geological, that just in part explain the quick decline: in the
World case it was the Iran-Iraq War and the OPEC embargo, and in
the UK case the PIPER accident.
Also, Brent had a sharp decline between 1989 and 1992:



I don't know if it was related to the PIPER incident or
something related to the oilfield.

3) The giant fields in the UK were discovered quite quickly. As in
the rest of the Oil basins of the world, in the UK there is a King
(Forties, which production started in 1975), Queen I (Brent 1976), Queen II (Ninian 1978), and a few Lords
(Magnus 1983, Piper 1976 & Nelson 1994).



In the World case many of the super-giants came into production in
the late 60's and 70's. So most of the super-giants were
discovered quite soon in the oil history, as in the Uk case.

4) Actually, the premature peak of UK is quite well explained by these
premature discoveries. I will try to show this by
the following graph:


So the production of UK without its biggest 5 oilfields is
very Hubbert-like. This trend continues, that is, if you remove the 10 biggest oilfields, you get an even smoother profile. I claim that this is also true for the world
case, although I don't have a graph to support my claim yet.

In summary, I think that the premature discoveries of
super-giants can cause odd production profiles. So it would be
better to factor them out before you do modeling.

Also note that the role of very mature super-giants won't be decisive in the future,
since their weight in the overall production will diminish. This is very clear in the case of UK, where nowadays Forties, Brent, Ninian, Magnus & Piper represent just a small portion of the total production.

In summary, I think that the premature discoveries of super-giants can cause odd production profiles. So it would be better to factor them out before you do modeling.

Interesting.  That's sort of the opposite of the Hubbert theory...

Well, what I say is not really the opposite of Hubbert's theory.

I bring up again the oil pyramid of Matt Simmons:
The 26 biggest fields (out of over 4000) accounted for 26% of oil production until recently.
Between 1970 and 1975, one field (Ghawar) accounted for close to 10% of oil production in the world!
(Ghawar's oil production until 1980 appears in "Twilight in the Desert").

Ghawar was discovered in 1948, and if you read "Twilight in the desert" you see that Standard Oil
was very lucky to discover the first big field in South Arabia in the 40's, they were about to pull
out! Then shortly afterwards came Ghawar and the others. So by luck Standard Oil discovered Ghawar
in 1948, it could have been much later. Ghawar could have been underwater also. Discovering fields
is just a probabilistic thing.

If Ghawar and the other ME super-giants would have been discovered 15-20 years later then probably
oil production would have been more Hubbert-like, which is not! The decline after 1980 makes the
curve very non-Hubbert. And you can argue that this decline happened because these super-giants
existed in the first place, and where in the hands of a few rulers of the ME in the second place.

So, if you factor-out super-giants and deal with the rest, you get a lot of fields of the same
magnitude (Ghawar is just in another league). Some of the normal-size fields are discovered before
and some later, and they just compensate and you have a gaussian distribution or something that
looks alike: the logistic curve.

But there is nothing that compensates the early discovery of Ghawar and the rest of super-giants in
the ME. And this distorts the overall picture.

In more mathematical terms, what I am saying is that the central limit theorem
does not apply at all well, because there are a
few fields that are much larger that the rest. If you leave out these aberrations, the central
limit theorem will work much better, and will give you something close to a normal distribution.

Re:  UK Versus Total North Sea

Empirically, IMO the HL technique works best for large producing regions with serious production, about two mbpd or so, for a significant period of time, about two decades or so.  

There are two reasons to do a HL analysis, to estimate recoverable reserves and to develop a model for the world.  

IMO, the two "cleanest" HL models for the world are the Lower 48 and the total North Sea--largely unencumbered production by private companies.  

The Lower 48 peaked at slightly less than 50% in 1970, the North Sea at slightly more than 50% in 1999.   Note that the top 10 major oil companies working the North Sea, using the best data, the best technology, and the best engineers in the world, were predicting that North Sea production would not peak until at least 2010 (Source:  Matt Simmons).  

The total North Sea (crude + condensate) HL plot that I did shows a beautiful linear progression from about 1988 onward.  Qt is 60 Gb, and they are about two-thirds depleted.  

In summary, I think that the premature discoveries of super-giants can cause odd production profiles. So it would be better to factor them out before you do modeling.

No, you should never throw any data away. That is one of the golden rules of the scientific method.  Yes, I know some statisticians like to throw away outliers, but you really should do this only if you understand what the fundamentals are behind the behavior. In reality, what you want to factor out should be part of the underlying model. I might be misunderstanding you, but why not keep the "premature discoveries" in the model?

Take a look at the discovery curves published by Laherrere.

You can see the bimodal components right there. The problem is that the two modes are highly asymmetric in the discovery profile but not so much in the production profile. My own analysis leads me to believe that the second peak gets strongly accentuated by a strong increase in the extraction rate.

I have never believed in the conventional symmetric Hubbert curves, preferring instead to treat the system as a N-order  temporal response to the initial discover stimulus curves.
Ever since about 1995, the extraction rates have progressively climbed so they could keep up with the diminishing returns from the remaining amount.

The full analysis is here

But trying to model single fields is almost impossible. And you have to, if you want to explain the
whole production history. They have all sorts of strange profiles due to decisions made by very few people: overproduction (Ghawar?, Romashkino), political issues (Ghawar), accidents (Piper), decline
and then new life due to new technology (Brent), applying secondary and tertiary recovery at the
same time (Cantarell, Ghawar), strikes, terrorism, etc...

When you have fields of average size these kinds of behaviors exist, but they get smoothed because
you add up a lot of the same magnitude.

Due to normal depletion, mismanagement, geopolitics, exhaustion of EOR techniques, etc. the big fields at the bottom of the pyramid (26% of production at the time of this graph by Simmons) totalling just 26 fields eventually move up the pyramid. So the distorted picture smoothes out eventually and then the Central Limit Theorem applies. Actually, the graph is misleading because the largest producers are defined as 500/kbpd whereas the truly big fields produce much more than that or once did. For example, Russia from Simmons
My list of Russian "giant" fields is simply an educated guess, based on various published stories of large fields. Russia's ten largest oilfields account for over 1.8 million barrels a day of Russian production. Its largest producer is still Samotlor, the one Russian field that once produced in excess of 3.5 million barrels of oil each day. Samotlor's output occasionally gets mentioned in various oil journals. The last guess in print had Stamoltor producing 320,000 barrels per day. Almost all the Russian giant oilfields are located in Western Siberia. One giant oilfield outside Siberia is the Romashkino field in the Volga Region. Prior to Western Siberia's oil discoveries, this was Russia's single biggest oil field. It still apparently produces close to 300,000 barrels a day. All of these giant fields are far past peak production. All have high water cuts. Russia is not a low cost oil producer, even in its largest oilfield.
So, in the future the pyramid gets truncated at the bottom and fatter in the middle and at the top. In addition, some fields at the top just become exhausted and drop out. Importantly, almost all the fields at the bottom of the pyramid are old. Taken all together, one can infer that oil will become more scarce and expensive just from these observations alone. As of the year 2000, Country, Date of Discovery, Production in kbpd.

Saudi Arabia Ghawar 1948 4,500
Mexico Cantarell 1976 1,211
Kuwait Burgan 1938 1,200
China Daquig 1959 1,108
Iraq Kirkuk 1927 900
Iraq Rumailia North 1958 700
Saudi Arabia Abqaiq 1940 600
Saudi Arabia Shayba 19751 600
U.S.A. Prudhoe Bay 1968 550
China Shengli 1962 547
Brazil Marlim 1985 530
Iraq Rumailia South 1953 500
Saudi Arabia Safaniyah 1951 500
Saudi Arabia Zuluf 1965 500

Even a cursory look at this list reveals that there have been major changes since the year 2000. It would be interesting if somebody could find an updated list for 2005. I couldn't locate one.

That's extremely interesting Roberto!
Roberto, thanks also on behalf of Chicken Little here. Chicken could not have said as well as you did. And after all he is just a bird brain. But he was thinking something like that as applied to geological processes.

I guess if you multiply the number of fields in each size band against the average reserves size of that band (Kings, Queens, Nobles, etc.) it gives you the total volume in each of the size bands and that number converges toward some central value.

After Piper Alpha's destruction in 1988, the UKCS Oil Industry started looking very carefully at safety issues on Platforms. At the time, the oil price was hovering at or below the average of 20.94 USD / Bbbl. Immediately after Piper Alpha, production was not so important as the massive safety concerns and retrofitting of equipment and proceedures.

Around this time, Brent and others started to go into decline. A drilling campaign was instituted on Brent and a lot of other platforms in order to try and bring production up: Horizontal drilling, 'Kebab' drilling (into slump structures and isolated traps hitherto not easy to reach). The technology was available, the price was right.
Hence the two peaks and a new lease of life. Short of very major discoveries, the second peak will be the last.
 

Thanks for clarifying this.

So if I understand well, it was just unfortunate that Piper accident coincided (more or less) with Brent's decline. That is what exacerbated the drop after the first peak.

Very good analysis!

Oil production seems to have two components:
1- a deterministic component based on the contribution of a few super-giant and giant fields that provides 25% to 50% of the total production;
2- a stochastic component where only a mean behavior can be derived from the contribution of thousands of small fields.
Clearly, only on the second component the central limit therorem could eventually be applied (in its convolution formulation). One consequence, is that the resulting production curve will probably be gaussian.

I try to look at that problem a while ago on PO.com:

Convergence of the sum of many oil field productions

I also agree with your conclusion that super-giant fields won't play an important role in the future. A simple Monte-Carlo simulation based on log-normal distribution for the field size and the discovery history of oil fields seems to confirm that fact:


src:A Statistical Model for the Simulation of Oil Production

We are entering now in the "tail effect" of the log-normal distribution where production from a sheer number of small fields will shape the global production curve.

I read your first post (Convergence of the sum of many oil field productions) a while ago and I liked it.

But I hadn't read the second post about the Montecarlo simulation based on the Simmons paper, and it is extremely interesting. I agree that it is a very good confirmation of the behaviour of the supergiants I was talking abot. Thanks so much for the analysis and pointing it to me.

Do you think it is possible to do this analysis for the real fields productions?

I was planning to remove the supergiant fields production from the total oil production, and try to model afterwards. Of course obtaining the production for the supergiant fields is a very daunting, even impossible, task but an aproximation, I believe, is plausible.

Do you think it is possible to do this analysis for the real fields productions?

I was planning to do that as soon as I saw your detailed production curves about Norway and the UK. The idea will be to confirmed that the global production will be soon dominated by  productions coming from relatively small fields which means that the "Hubbert" component of global production is taking over the old determinist-like component from giant/super-giant fields. The behavior of the small field component is a statistical one and should be dependent on a small set of parameters (filed size cut-off, discovery pattern, etc.).

Of course obtaining the production for the supergiant fields is a very daunting, even impossible, task but an aproximation, I believe, is plausible

It's probably possible if we have a few production points from which a rough production enveloppe can be derived.  That's why the thread on big fields (The Top Twenty Fields: Are They in Decline? What Do We Know? (Updated)) is importnat and should be maintained.
The idea will be to confirm that the global production will be soon dominated by productions coming from relatively small fields which means that the "Hubbert" component of global production is taking over the old determinist-like component from giant/super-giant fields. The behavior of the small field component is a statistical one and should be dependent on a small set of parameters (filed size cut-off, discovery pattern, etc.).

I agree 100%. I will send you an email...

I also agree that mantaining a list of the top twenty fields is very important, but it should include present and past production history.

Maybe a wiki type of page with the latest information we gather about giant oilfields could be a good idea!

Would you like to write this up into a story for TOD:UK?
chris@vitaltrivia.co.uk
Sure! Give me a couple of days and I will send it to you.

Thanks