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109 comments on Shedding Light on the Question of Reserves Growth
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109 comments on Shedding Light on the Question of Reserves Growth
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I'll just point out one, very obvious thing.
The reserve growth result is highly dependent on the expected increase from secondary recovery fields. If 10%(a nice round number...) were actually 8% it would result in a reserve growth of less than 200Gb. Taking Ghawar as the stated example, is there really the scope for tertiary recovery to yield an extra ~12Gb from the field? How does 10% stack up on a sanity check?
Putting a degree of extra precision on that 10% number would be worth the effort.
agreed. any ideas about how to do that?
i think a 10% increase in recovery after efficient secondary mechanisms have been exhausted is probably optimistic.
From a peak oil perspective its probably irrelevant. Your not getting high production rates out of this sort of extraction.
We tend to equate reserves with a certain assumed production rate but thats far from the truth. Once your past secondary recovery its not all that interesting. Theoretically we will be extracting over 20mbpd for a very very long time but who cares ?
On a small part of the oil extracted using secondary mechanisms will be extracted while we still have high production rates from primary and secondary recovery. All that matters is what are the reserves recoverable by primary and secondary recovery. I think you will find that we are down to a few 100GB of oil in this class and it makes up over 60% of our production. I could care less about the remaining 40% of or less of oil produced via secondary recovery. Its not clear how much of this will be extracted nor who and how it will be used once oil is no longer useful as a cheap commodity.