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40 comments on Empirical Relationships Between Reserves and Production Rates

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Euan Mearns on November 9, 2007 - 1:32pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

Khebab - I've been doing a bit of frantic reading around this and a couple of points. The first is that in their official press release Petrobras refer to an area called Tupi that may conatin this amount of oil. It does not seem to be a single pool.

And when they say they hope to produce at 100,000 bpd by 2010 or 2011 - this is a very optimistic time line, but not impossible since this will be produced from a floating production system. These are often used to conduct extended well tests - and so it is possible they are thinking of using exisiting equipment to conduct long tests on a small number of wells - this would provide a lot of valuable information on reservoir volume, connectivity and performance. They can add more production later by adding more ships.

Some other points. This is in 1500 to 3000 m of water. I think Petrobras currently operate up to 1000 m - so this is pushing the envelope into new engineering territory. But Petrobras are word leaders at doing this.

They also say this is light oil - at 28 API this is not light but intermediate crude. It is lighter I believe than the other oil they produce.

2006 Brazil produced 1.8 mmbpd and consumed 2.1 mmbpd -so this should help them atain and maintain self sufficiency.

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Khebab on November 9, 2007 - 1:40pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I agree, it's probably too early to know the impact of this discovery. We don't even know the Oil&Gas ratio yet (recoverable volumes are given in BOE).

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HankF on November 9, 2007 - 2:58pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Is "hacking" a new type of mathematical operation? Har Har.

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Mriswith on November 9, 2007 - 5:07pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I think it seems obvious he meant the Richard Stallman definition of hacking

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marcosdumay on November 9, 2007 - 4:21pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

"They also say this is light oil - at 28 API this is not light but intermediate crude. It is lighter I believe than the other oil they produce."

That is what I get from their press releases too. Brazilian oil is heavy to the point that we mostly don't refine it, we sell and buy light oil. That field seem to have the lightest oil of Brazil.

Also:

"...this is a very optimistic time line..."

Brazilian governemnt is always optimist when talking about energy.

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alanisthename on November 10, 2007 - 4:51am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Very interesting post, Khebab, that opens a can of worms.

I suspect that Brazil's 'recoverable' reserves are closer to OIIP than to proved. This appears to be the trend nowadays. OIIP is a constant, being fairly easy to measure. The percentage recovered over time is a variable so URR must be a variable. A bit of equation abuse gives:

V(URR) = K(OIIP) * V(R%)

New discoveries and the expected flow rates are being inflated by publishing OIIP instead of proved. They are the asymptote to which URR will approach but never reach.

The other equation is what Saudi Arabia uses when they talk about their reserves. I call this the lawyers' definition:

Reserves = OIIP - Produced

New oil discoveries are being overstated on the old basis and there won't be any reserve growth. Things are even worse than they look.

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