The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | How Technology Increases Oil Production

67 comments on How Technology Increases Oil Production

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

| Show without comments | PDF version

SamuM on July 17, 2008 - 3:04am

Excellent and very clear article! I particularly like the scale question "How can you double something and still have ten times less than you started with?".

Scale is what people have most trouble with in regards to PO, there are plenty of examples:

R/P: "But with current reserves we have more than 30 years of production left at this level!" -> no understanding of demand growth and especially flow rate
EOR: "We can double the flow rate" -> Yes, but only for fields with a current flow rate of c. 1/10 of the max flow rate.
Production peak: "Well, if we can't pump more, we'll just use 86 Mb/d for the next 30 years" -> Again no understanding of flow rate, or decline rates from mature and smaller fields
Decline rates: "We'll, if oil fields decline c. 4% p.a. we just adjust to that" -> No understanding of the progressive nature of decline rates (which are already accelerating globally for mature fields)
Alternative fuels: "We'll just move to biofuels and syncrude" -> No calculations/estimates about production rates or flow rates (6Mb/d and 7 Mb/d from each may be a lot in the next 20 years, but not enough to fill a natural decline for two decades after the peak)
Alternative energy infrastructure: "We just mover over to electricity from primary fuel source X" - Again, no calculations on how quickly we can replace 850M ICE cars, a hundred thousand kerosene using aircraft and c. 50 000 seafaring trade ships with electric motor equivalents. Also no understanding of deprecation times for electricity infra investments, new power plants and most of all the source of that new fuel X, which is supposed to be cleaner than coal, more abundant, non-intermittent, very scalable, non-polluting, cheaper to invest/manfuacture/buy and available everywhere in fungible worldwide markets.
Again, as I have stated before, I'm not saying to despair or that there's no hope - just that many people who I still talk to after several years refuse to understand the potential gravity of the situation due to the scale of it.

There's always something 'out there', whether EOR, not-yet-found-supergiant-fields, reserve growth or whatever, that will save the day. Something will 'come along' and 'save us'.

I find this type of betting on a positive black swan not only intellectually naive, but also potentially very irresponsible.

That is why I thank you for providing a clear and concise explanation for the likelihood of EOR 'saving us'.

We need more like this.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

ReservoirGuy on July 17, 2008 - 11:29am

"merely extending the tail end of production in oil fields that are well past their own peak in production."

As a petroleum engineer I understand this better than the average person on the street. However the problem is in the lack of understanding of what "advanced technology" means as applied to raising production ( the magnitude and the point in life cycle of a field). This leads many to think that it will lead to solving our problems with production needed to meet current demand.

The real problem is the diagram showing the growth in reserves trend world wide. So far no technology that I am aware of is able to significantly change the trend we are observing now.

Good article !!!!

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

George.Mobus on July 17, 2008 - 12:46pm

A student recently, and a colleague, sometime back, both brought me copies of Popular Science (or Popular Mechanics) with articles about how a new solar technology would solve all of our problems. They offered these as proof that everything would be fine. An awful lot of people read the popular media accounts of technology and believe these are the final words on the subject. It raises unrealistic expectations of what technology is, what it can do, and how it is developed.

The article points out an incredibly important issue - the law of diminishing returns. This law not only applies to marginal oil recovery per unit of energy consumed, it also applies to technology development itself. The vast majority of technological development is marginal improvement. Occasionally we get lucky and find a new physics principle (e.g. solid state electronics) that allows something like a quantum leap. But you'll note that this seems to apply to information technology more than production work. IT can be applied to production work to gain some marginal increase in efficiency (e.g. using robots to make cars). But processes that do useful work don't come under the miracle of Moore's Law (we have yet to see how nanotech machines will be applied to large-scale production work).

In the west we suffer from the innovation myth. We've seen so much innovation in one particular area - digital solid state electronics - that we transfer that observation to apply to all technology. And so, many people lack critical judgment when it comes to assessing the efficacy of technological solutions. Sadly this applies to politicos and policy makers (e.g. corn ethanol) as well as the general public. And sadly, it will be a block to a deeper understanding that would allow us to make real progress.

George

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

The Dude on July 17, 2008 - 1:42pm

I bet you're thinking of A Solar Grand Plan: Scientific American. PV with storage in NG fields nationwide. Don't think many tech breakthroughs would be called for but gawd! what a monstrous amount of buildup. It's been hashed over here, do a search. And there have been a few other Grand Solar Plans proposed here, like Staniford's.

Innovation and scalability are the two things people just don't understand. What we need are short-and-sweet illustrations of the size of these hurdles. People can't grok page after page of reasoned documented arguments, they need something that they can take home, that can't be forgotten readily, like 1000 barrels a second or a cubic mile of oil.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

DaveMart on July 17, 2008 - 4:27pm

If you check the comments on the Solar Grand Plan, you will see that it was pretty thoroughly disembowelled.

Turns out they wanted to use compressed air as the storage medium, and the process they suggested would use natural gas.
That would involve more NG than is likely to be available, apart from it's global warming implications.

Solar has a big contribution to make in providing peaking power, but even at the latitude of the Mohave winter incidence is only around 25% or so of that in the summer, so that you would need a massive overbuild to provide base-load.
That passes over the fact that you would also need to have dry cooling, which is expensive as it is a water-stressed area, and ignores the fact that even providing enough storage for overnight power is not easy or cheap.

Solar thermal is also dependent on really clear skies, far more than, say, amorphous silicon, so that back up power is also needed for up to a week, even for the Mohave, as I was informed by someone in the industry.

As for schemes to power the whole country this way, let alone run Europe from transmission lines from the Sahara, they are pure science-fiction.

PV power locally produced is a far better bet, although very expensive for the moment.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

George.Mobus on July 17, 2008 - 6:56pm

Anyone catch Al Gore's speech today? I'd really like to know who his energy advisers are. Maybe the same guys who wrote that SciAm article. I did read it and at the time just shook my head.

I actually designed and built solar energy systems back in the 80's. HUD sponsored demo projects and a few private projects. In fact that is how I got into computers - designing some of the first µ-processor based controllers for solar collection. I got out of the business when I realized that it probably took more total energy to make the glass, aluminum, copper, and urethane insulation, manufacture and deliver the collectors than the systems ever delivered to point of use. For the home owner - energy savings. For the nation - net energy loss.

In Gore's speech he emphasized the connectedness of energy, climate, and economics which was good. But in most of the proposed solutions I fail to see whole systems thinking being displayed. I also realize that the vast majority of people simply do not intuit the second law of thermodynamics. They don't grok ERoEI, or any of the real physical constraints that dictate energy engineering.

Scale and rate of construction of whole systems. I wonder what it will take to get people to think this way?

George

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

Stephen Hubbard on July 17, 2008 - 11:11pm

Just to echo your point SamuM,

A simple calculation with Excel shows that we will have to build roughly 16 one Gigawatt nuclear power plants (1-GWNPP) per year to compensate for just a 2.5% drop off after peak oil. For you trivia fans, a 1-GWPP produce roughly the same amount of energy per year as in 4.5 million barrels of crude. An interesting highlight of this is that in just 3 years, we would have to build roughly the same number of power plants and Senator McCain is proposing to build by 2030 as part of his comprehensive solution to the energy crisis. A 4.5% roll off requires around 75 1-GWNPP/year or roughly 1 1/2 per week. I think I'll go take my Zoloft now.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

BlueTwilight on July 20, 2008 - 5:08am

Said by Stephen Hubbard:

... 1-GWPP produce roughly the same amount of energy per year as in 4.5 million barrels of crude. An interesting highlight of this is that in just 3 years, we would have to build roughly the same number of power plants and Senator McCain is proposing to build by 2030....

The comparison of the energy from different sources is not this simple because one must consider the efficiency when it is used. Although I do not know the enthalpy of combustion of crude oil, assuming electricity is to replace 4.5 Mb of gasoline to power cars, I get:

enthalpy of combustion of gasoline: 130 MJ / gallon

130 MJ/gal * 4.5 Mb * 42 gal/b = 24.6 x 10¹⁵ J

Because an electric car is 3 times more efficient than a gasoline powered one, this translates into an electric power plant operating continuously for a year with a power of:

(24.6 x 10¹⁵ J/year / 31,560,000 s/year / 3 = 260 MW

Edit: The CAFE Formula, Forum on Physics & Society of The American Physical Society, David Hafemeister, v36, n4, October 2007; states an electric car is 5.4 times more efficient than a gasoline powered one making my calculation too high.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.