The Oil Drum

In general from my reading horizontal wells tend to allow extraction to the point that additional EOR methods are probably not going to a whole lot of additional oil. The combination of early water flood, horizontal wells tends to extract 90% or more of the easily extractable oil at a low water cut and high production volume until they water out.

MRC wells can be treated as a number of horizontal wells with the potential for interaction. As far as gravity stable goes generally true but I'm not sure what it means given the large amount of producing area exposed its like discussing a underground river vs a spring. Even coning is different also of course fractures are a lot more important for horizontal wells. Combined with modern imaging methods its a technical revolution.

My point is that in attempting to come up with a correction factor for technical progress I've concluded that modern extraction methods result in much higher flow rates for longer and thus higher depletion rates. Certainly in the case of tight formations that where not producible without horizontal wells we have increased overall URR however I've not found convincing evidence that horizontal wells actually result in real increases in URR in general. The economics are great but the total recovery situation is murky at best.
In general once your done extracting with horizontal wells very little can be done to extract additional oil. At best you may have some bypassed oil that can be extracted with a few horizontal wells or a workover of the existing horizontal well. Your basically left with a field thats at 90% plus water cut and most of the remaining oil pretty much immobile. In my opinion running vertical wells and washing the rock in a sense at a high water cut probably results in higher URR.

The bottom line is advanced methods have a large impact on both production rates and depletion rates in old and new fields. This factor has not been adequately included in any of the peak oil proposals I've seen.

If you take into account technical progress and take the 1970's vertical well with water flood as a sort of baseline "standard" in my opinion 50% of the current production can be directly attributed to technical advances. So if we had stayed at the same technical levels as in the 70's oil production today would have been around 40mbd not 80mbd.

Sure some of this production would simply not be viable using the older technology but still its a big factor and in my opinion or URR estimates especially the estimates of the amount of oil remaining that can be extracted at a high production rate may be off by a large margin.

The amount of "fast" oil left to extract seems to be effectively the same as what M King Hubbert predicted for the work 1250 GB. We have extracted about 1100 GB+. And extract at about 30GB a year. A worldwide watercut of 80% plus indicates that this argument could be valid.

Thus if I'm right we will see global production effectively crash in the 2008-2009 time frame.

I could easily be wrong for example we could have 2500 GB of easily extractable oil that would give is 4-5 more years of production at our current rates but then I'd expect global water cut to be lower say 60-70%.

Certainly we have additional production from 90% plus watered out fields this stripper well production accounts for 2 mbpd in production from the US maybe 20-30mbpd of overall world production this is limited by water handling facilitates and declines at a slow rate. So we have a sort of base stripper well production level that can last for decades.

This leaves almost 50mbd of production that potentially has a short life span 10 years or less this comes from work overs of older fields and new generally offshore fields extracted at high depletion rates. I don't see us replacing this level of production in a ten year time frame. Also of course all the more traditional production thats mixed in continues to deplete. This is the super giant problem thats been well studied on the Oildrum. Production from the old super giants is distributed in both this 50% and the baseline stripper well level. A lot of the super giants are now stripper well production and some like Canterell and Ghawar seem to be benefiting from advanced extraction methods.

Taking 1990 as year zero for the introduction of horizontal drilling and other advanced practices and assuming the peak return on the use of the methods was around 2000 says we should start dropping off about now out to 2010-2012 or so.
The drop is eventually limited by water handling issues.

Better methods such as MRC wells where added later but they generally resulted in ever higher depletion rates so the overall technical boom if you will seems to stay centered around 2000. So although we continued to get higher production from methods developed later the depletion rates continued to increase.

I'm keen to see the mega-projects extended back past 2000 since it seems to me that most of the 10mbpd increase since then is purely from increased technical capabilities.

Time will tell of course but so far I've not figured out a way to discount a large technical effect and resulting asymmetric global production profile since I just don't see a lot of additional URR at high flow rates given the nature of our technology.

I'd love to see real experts comment on the various technologies and recoveries at the well and field level. I'd love to be proven wrong but more importantly I feel I've looked at the problem enough to hopefully convince people its something worthy of further deeper analysis. If its not pursued then time will tell I just can't see us making it all the way through 2008-2009 at the current production rates so we will know soon enough.

The issue at hand is Ron's claim that: "Those who are counting on a "gradual" decline in Saudi Arabia and Russia, I believe, are sadly mistaken. The collapse will be sudden and catastrophic."

I want to see the evidence/argument to support that claim. Give it to me full-strength, if you've got it. Convince me. So far, you're just playing word games.