Opps! I know that! Silly me.

Heinberg's article struck me as crucially important as well. If we are in fact going to be facing an across-the-board fossil fuel crisis in the near future, we'd best be ready to make some hard decisions on adaptation, curtailment and substitution. We probably won't but it would be nice if we had good data just in case someone decided to do something sensible.

On that note, if all FF's start to decline, the pressure on biofuels is going to become enormous. Just for shits and grins, the other day I did a calculation: if we took all the world's vegetable food crops and turned them into fuel, how much oil equivalent would we end up with? Here's the quote from the biofuels article on my web site:

How much oil-equivalent biofuel could we actually make if we turned all the world's major grain and oilseed crops into automobile fuel, leaving none whatever for food? In other words, what are humanity's relative energy requirements for food and transportation? Would their scales of use allow us to easily and effectively substitute a portion of our food energy use for transportation fuel?

To answer this question I considered ethanol from corn, wheat, rice, sugar cane and sugar beets, and biodiesel from soybeans and rapeseed (canola), plus palm&sunflower oils. In each case I converted the entire world crop into fuel, discounted the ethanol by 1/3 for its lower energy content, and converted the annual production in litres to the oil-industry standard measure of millions of barrels of oil equivalent per day. Here are the results:

Ethanol

Corn:
World crop (Million tonnes): 700
Litres per tonne: 400
MBOE/day: 3.2

Wheat:
World crop (Million tonnes): 600
Litres per tonne: 370
MBOE/day: 2.5

Rice:
World crop (Million tonnes): 600
Litres per tonne: 400
MBOE/day: 2.7

Sugar Cane:
World crop (Million tonnes): 1324
Litres per tonne: 100
MBOE/day: 2.5

Sugar Beets:
World crop (Million tonnes): 250
Litres per tonne: 108
MBOE/day: 0.3

Biodiesel

Soybeans:
World crop (Million tonnes): 270
Litres per tonne: 140
MBOE/day: 0.5

Rapeseed (Canola):
World crop (Million tonnes): 55
Litres per tonne: 400
MBOE/day: 0.4

Palm&Sunflower oils:
World crop (Million tonnes): 42
Litres per tonne: 900
MBOE/day: 0.7

The total from turning virtually all of our food into fuel is 12.8 MBOE/day - only 15% of the current world oil consumption of 84 million barrels per day. To make matters worse, it takes a lot more energy to make biofuels than it does to simply pump oil from the ground and refine it. A rough estimate is that it takes at least twice as much. Accounting for this necessary energy outlay reduces the available net energy of our biofuels to less than 8% of the world's oil consumption.

This is one of the reasons why using crop-sourced biofuels for transportation is such a horrifically bad idea. We strip mine our top soil, we deplete our water tables, we starve everyone and we still have only an 8% solution. We all - individuals, countries and our whole civilization - need to be very, very cautious in promoting the use of biofuels, lest our thirst for transportation fuel overrun our common sense. And we must always remember to crunch the numbers.

Heinberg's article definitely sounds like it could be big news. I was curious about the role of Illinois coal. So I googled "Illinois Coal Production" and found this enlightening article from Southern Illinois University - Carbondale,

http://www.siu.edu/~perspect/05_sp/coal1.html.

Its subheadline is this:

"Illinois coal is well suited to new, cleaner energy systems on the horizon. Reducing global warming and developing a hydrogen economy may depend on these technologies, which are being researched intensively at SIUC."

Apparently Illinois coal production fell by 50% becasue it is higher in sulphur than Wyoming coal and difficult to scrub. The hope is that with coal gasification and IGCC, this will not be a problem and will in fact lead to industrial sulphur production. The whole article is a fascinating look at carbon dioxide sequestration, coal bed methane, efficient coal recovery, and other issues related to 21st century coal use.

I think this deserves a closer look, and frankly, it disturbs me a little bit that someone as high profile in our community as Heinberg would just accept the 50% decline in Illinois coal as a sign of a limited supply without apparently doing much checking into it.

Hallelujah!!

If everyone is really serious about this...

We need an advanced imaged analyst to look at the thickness of the reservoir through the various hatched vertical lines... compare that to the average thickness recorded (the top of the structure appears to be the thickest to me)... than with some estimate of thickness we can relate that to the distance above the original WOC. Which puts us into position on this structure and tells us how much reservoir remains above us.

Roughly I get about 2.3 ratio of height above oil water contact to reservoir thickness on the West Side.

I think the label might be "PermK MD", suggesting this is a visualization of the permeability in millidarcies. Presumably, this is permeability at the top of the reservoir and the red (and black) areas are the famous SuperK channels? Greg Croft says average K of 619 MD for 'Ain Dar, and 639 MD for Shedgum, so the greenish color would be about right for most of it. Can anyone confirm this interpretation?

Which would be interesting timing:

North 'Ain Dar is not big enough (about 500kbpd in 2003) for even a large change of production to explain this. If one could make the case that the same thing was happening in the same general timeframe across all of 'Ain Dar/Shedgum, however, it would get even more interesting.

That graphic also shows Safaniya, the world's largest offshore field, in substantial decline. This is as significant as Cantarell.

Link to SPE 98847 is http://www.spe.org/elibinfo/eLibrary_Papers/spe/2006/06EURO/SPE-98847-MS... but needs to paid for.

Intersting points from the summary:

- North Uthmaniyah water cut averaged 46% over the 5 years 2001-2006

Water Management Practices to minimise water production included:
- Cyclic Production Modes (guessing this means "resting" wells
- Rigless water shut-offs (same thing was practised at Ain Dar)
- Horizontal side-tracks (same as Ain Dar)
- Partial Penetrated wells (no idea what this means)

In SPE 93439 (http://freeoil.1111mb.com/spe/spe93439.pdf) relating to northern Ain Dar, Figure 1 shows water cut for what I asume to be the entire Ain Dar field at 42%. Figure 2 shows huge water cut of 80% in the northern part of the Ain Dar field.

So we have two SPE papers (northern Ain Dar and northern Uthmaniyah) showing water cuts at an average 44%. Shedgum lies between these two areas, would it not be reasonable to assume a similar water cut level there?

On page 18 of Saleri's 2005 paper a water cut of 36% is claimed for the Ain Dar / Shedgum area - this implies a water cut of only 28% at Shedgum. Shedgum shares almost exactly the same reservoir properties as Ain Dar, and has been in production for the same amount of time, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that water cut would be at about the same level....

Hey FF, email me at the eds box if you can...
PG

Sorry I can't join in, cos I get out of prison tomorrow and got to pack my things.

Would just point out that 137 billion is high - but not outrageous. Especially if spun out over a longer period. (and I'm aware there is the 2007-2012 bit to add)

KSA had produced 116 billion to end of 2005.

NGL is a natural part of any petroleum system - valuable liquids - with production growing rapidly world wide.

I think this projection is over-optimistic and I believe Michael Smith does too. But I also think it provides a counterbalance to the notion that Saudi production peaked in 2005 and is "crashing".

You can't use LNG as a replacement for Light Sweet Crude.(You can as a revenue source, but that doesn't do the US any good.) Also, there appears to be a lot of 'Hope To Find', gobs and gobs of optimistic outlook and anticipation of something the size of Canterell hiding out there. I guess that's why they refer to this place as the "magical kingdom".

Also consider from previous posts they seem to like to count oil behind the water front and reserves. Not that this is wrong per-se but the production rate will be much lower for this oil.

Next as far as I know universally the use of horizontal wells of all kinds has lead to steeper decline rates than fields correctly produced with verticals. I've seen posts where fields drilled with vertical wells where damaged or horizontals where needed to produce the field. But the production profiles I've seen for horizontal wells all have steeper decline rates. What they do is give a much higher peak production so even if they recover more oil its offset by being able to producer faster with steeper declines.
The overall result is to generally sharpen the curve its not clear to me you get higher URR's.

In any case the relationship is not a simple.

The counter argument that seems to be the strongest is both Russia and I think China are primarily vertical wells with high water cuts and they seem to have the most stable production with gentle decline rates. This gives you a lot more time to work on remediation to offset decline.
In fact I think the best way to produce a field is to use vertical wells until they no longer work and redevelop with advanced wells once the field is closer to being depleted.
This gives you the best placement of the horizontal wells since you can use all the knowledge gained from the verticals. In a sense this is how Ghawar seems to have been produced it does however give you in a way a false period of high production and greater declines.

Which brings you back full circle the advanced wells take a lot longer to drill it seems and your limited by above ground factors on how fast you can compensate for fairly large changes in production rate once a advanced well waters out.

This is why I think a lot of people believe its a above ground problem but in a sense the problem is already in set once you go with advanced extraction. Your running the treadmill a lot faster and the speed at which you can deploy technology is limited by complexity problems.

Finally I think the results presented in this thread are at least slightly optimistic since problems with individual advanced wells have a greater impact. And KSA is not quite right to compare there water cut with others the technology is different and the effects are different. Even a 30% water cut is bad news for advanced wells since decline will go a lot faster soon.

This does explain in a way why they cut the one production graph after thirty years at a 20% water cut. You don't want to see the second half.