<Geothermia The Oil Drum ODAC Newsletter, Wednesday 07 November>

Empirical Relationships Between Reserves and Production Rates

Posted by Sam Foucher on November 9, 2007 - 12:01pm
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: oil reserves, saudi arabia, urr [list all tags]

A very short post before the weekend. I always wondered if there was a quick way to derive the expected production rates per day from the total recoverable oil volume (URR). That can be handy, when a new oilfield discovery has been announced for instance. More below the fold.


In a  recent article:

Pickering, A., The Oil Reserves Production Relationship, Energy Economics (2007). abstract.

Andrew Pickering established the following empirical relationship between proven reserves (R) and extraction rates (P):
P= aR + b
He then estimated a and b for three different group of countries using data from 1980 to 2002:
  • OPEC: a= 0.0096 mbpd/Gb, b= 0.2323 mbpd
  • Fringe: a= 0.0466 mbpd/Gb, b= 0.093 mbpd
  • Small Fringe : a= 0.0435 mbpd/Gb, b= 0.0418 mbpd
The Fringe group includes large non-OPEC extractors such as Canada, China, Mexico, Norway, Russia, the UK and the US. The small fringe is formed of the rest of the small non-OPEC extractors. We can already see that the first group has a very small values for the slope (a) compared to the other two groups which is not surprising because available proven reserve figures for OPEC are largely overstated. For fun, I hacked this simple linear relation in order to get a rough estimate of the total URR:
URR ~ Q(ymax) + (Pmax - b) / a
Where ymax is the year of maximum production (Pmax)  and Q(ymax) the cumulative production. For instance, for Saudi Arabia you have ymax=1980 with Pmax=9.9 mbpd (Crude Oil + condensate) and Q(1980)=42.41 Gb. Using the OPEC parameters, we get 1,005 Gb! However, using the other two sets of parameters, we get :

Saudi Arabia (Fringe): 42.41 + (9.9-0.093)/0.0466= 253 Gb
Saudi Arabia (Small Fringe): 42.41 + (9.9-0.0418)/0.0435= 269 Gb

hmmm! These values seem strangely familiar.

Other countries:

Russia: 1.3 Tb (OPEC), 333 Gb (Fringe), 352 Gb (Small Fringe)
US (Lower 48):  956.5 (OPEC),  200 Gb (Fringe), 216 Gb (Small Fringe)

and finally, what about the entire world production? Using, ymax=2005 with Pmax=73.58 mbpd (Crude Oil + condensate) and Q(2005)=1,011 Gb:
8.7 Tb (OPEC), 2.6 Tb (Fringe), 2.7 Tb (Small Fringe)

Lately, a major oil find (Tupi field) has been announced by Petrobas (Brazil) yesterday. 5-8 Gb of recoverable oil, that should give between 260 and 390 kbpd using the Small Fringe parameters. However, Exploration and Production Director Guilherme Estrella said: "Petrobras could possibly produce 100,000 barrels a day at Tupi by 2010 or 2011". Using this 100 kbpd figure, we get a recoverable oil volume estimate between 0.15 Gb and 1.34 Gb.


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