 | Former CEO of Talisman Energy: Peak oil is 'here or hereabouts' | The Oil Drum | DrumBeat: February 1, 2008 |  |
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Local
- Streets: Utilitarian Corridors or Livable Public Space
- Summer Streets a Success!
- Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
TOD:Europe
- Oilwatch Monthly - November 2008
- The 2008 IEA WEO - Production Decline Rates
- The EU Strategic Energy Review: maybe not so depressing after all
TOD:Canada
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
- Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008)
TOD:ANZ
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
“This order [i.e. capitalism] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with the economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”
—Max Weber, 1905
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Heading Out, Stuart Staniford, Nate Hagens
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Gail the Actuary, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
I have been reading the Satellite O'er the Desert blog, and the job being done is truly remarkable. We are very lucky that these satelite images exist and are posted for free, so that some of the Aramco secrets can be revealed.
Noob question: why there arent any wells in the top right area of Ghawar (i presume Shedgum), corresponding to the red area on the right of the 3rd image from the modeled distribution? is it a satelite image problem(low res), or am i missing something?
There are wells there in Shedgum, of course, but Google Earth is not covering a big swath of that area. I have identified where the older wells are, so if GE ever gets around to using an updated high-res image (which exists--they are just being lazy!), a similar analysis could be done there.
If you know where to get updated high-res images of that area, then I can forward it on to my former colleagues and they'll get it included. However, I suspect the problem is that whoever it was that took the higher-res images wants to charge Google an arm and a leg to license it. Unfortunately a lot of areas in the world don't bring in enough advertising dollars from local search to justify the expense of acquiring better pictures.
Every last acre of Ghawar is covered in one or more 2006-2007 images from DigitalGlobe, the best out there. I'm convinced that someone is paying DG to take these shots. Why some of them are not being used (2006 Shedgum and Haradh images) is beyond me. A 2006 high-res shot of a small, isolated, but interesting (from an oil standpoint) area of Uthmaniyah was suddenly included a year after it was taken. There is also a 2007 DG image covering an area just south of there that I would like to have.
I would imagine that Google Earth has license to all of DigitalGlobe existing imagery such that they don't pay by the piece. If an image exists (e.g., someone paid for the photoshoot), the bottleneck is GE taking the time to correct for azimuth skew and put it in the right location. I don't think the decision to do that for a particular area is random, either.
Shedgum appears to have two high spots, a smaller one to the west and a much larger one to the east.
The missing high resolution swath appears to be centered on the larger eastern high spot, but the western smaller Shedgum high spot (which Stuarts red & white photo/graph show to be full of oil an not depleting between b & c) appears to be fully in the high area, but with no wells or rigs operating there.
Is this so ?
And if true does this imply that this small high spot is now depleted ? (or held in reserve ?)
Note that the small spot of Shedgum would be a major field in the United States.
Alan
Stuart's model for depletion assumed that the Arab-D reservoir is being depleted evenly from the bottom up. Thus, the higher spots would be the last to go. However, especially for Shedgum, this is not always the case. The remaining oil in Shedgum is to the west of the crest and on over to 'Ain Dar. A figure from Stuart's presentation at ASPO shows that, and I will do a post on Shedgum before too long. Perhaps GE will bless me with an update first.
Stuart's western "high" spot for Shedgum is in a high-res coverage area, but in a small strip dating to 2003 and there are maybe a couple of new wells evident then. Using a low-res 2006 image as an overlay, I can tentatively find about 9 more. There are also a couple of new wells on the west side of the "dead" zone, but it's otherwise rather quiet over there.