The Oil Drum

Reading from the link I see that the first stage of development is of an area with initial oil in place of 1.75 billion barrels of which they believe they can recover 250 million barrels. That is 14% recovery with all the technology that peak oil sceptics tell us is going to up the recovery factor.

It is probably safe to assume that this is the best part of the field and the rest of the 2.7 billion barrels will either have poorer yield of be more expensive to extract.

It is perhaps not surprising that it has not previously been developed despite being discovered 29 years ago.

Euan:
I think you are reading a lot more generality into my comment than I had intended.  I was thinking of such operations as Bingham Canyon where they are moving from an open pit mining of the copper ore into the underground, and, in a number of cases, diamond mining as, once they extract the surface accessible resource, they start to work down the pipe.

Further, if you go up on the hills West of Alnwick you will come to Eglingham, where my ancestors worked from the coal outcrops into shallow underground coal mining (You have to look hard to find the evidence of mining, and the remains of the houses).

I was trying to use the concept as the basis for discussion of how one can reclassify the volumes of oil available from a reservoir (along the lines of the changes that folk such as IHS and CERA are currently making).

My point in regard to SAGD is that it requires more energy (you have to heat the water to steam instead of of just getting it hot) and that it only recovers up to 60% of the oil - thus by "inventing" underground mining of the sand one could claim that one had increased the reserve available.

Regards

HO