42 comments on When CHOPS are not a dinner menu, but for heavy oil production
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42 comments on When CHOPS are not a dinner menu, but for heavy oil production
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A valuable primer on heavy oil, particularly the explanation of the tradeoffs involved in extracting more of the oil in place.
The Venezuelans have 1 trillion barrels of oil, and much of it can be extracted for $1 a barrel? Um. Um. Um. Um. I realize it's not that simple....still. Um.
Once you've extracted the oil, you have to refine it into a usable form (ie into normal, lighter crude). That costs more money.
$1 per barrel to extract? That's it, folks! Peak Oil has been officially CANCELLED for the forseeable future.
Fire up the Hummer production lines!
Pave over those organic victory gardens with fresh asphalt!
Let the American consumer know it's time to end the "psychological recssion" and start SPENDING!!
Regulars here should donate their Paul Erlich, Matthew Simmons & Kunstler books to the library and stock up on Julian Simon, Duncan Clarke & Larry Kudlow.
CRISIS IS OVER, PEOPLE --START CONSUMING AGAIN!!
Yes good news. Time to get back to skydiving.
I'll guess I'll go back to reading junkscience.com and the CO2 problem now.
There is always something on the internet that can destroy the world as we know it.
You just have to use the FSE to find it.
Over and out.
False Dichotomy Fallacy
There's a world of choices between "we're doomed" and "we're saved", and they're pretty much all more valid than either.
***
The world has an enormous amount of heavy oil. Producing heavy oil requires an enormous amount of infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn't magically appear overnight, even if you have the money to pay for it.
It's not easy to get high flow rates from heavy oil.
It's entirely possible that the world will be producing increasing amounts of heavy oil for decades to come, and that doing so will have virtually no effect on the timing of peak oil. That doesn't make it a savior and it doesn't make it useless; it just makes it another factor to consider.
You know I was being facetious, right?
The quote was from 2006, and times and costs have changed considerably since then, but what I was trying to use the quote for was rather than showing how much they had, how slowly there were likely to be able to produce it.
As the remaining oil to be extracted goes from the thinner sweeter crudes to the heavier ones so it flows less easily and production problems will increase. Being able to produce something at low cost, if the yield is also slow will not be a great help in the future, even if the reserve is large.
Very good presentation HO. About 20 years ago a piece of down hole equipment was developed to produce those "wormholes". It was a series of water jets that quickly cut channels back (60' or so) into the formation. The high flow rate described is rather unique from my limited experiences with heavy oil. Commonly a lack of reservoir drive energy is as much a problem as the viscosity. The subject formation must have had a strong drive. In south Texas there are hundred of millions of bbls of stranded oil that’s actually high quality but unrecoverable due to its viscosity. Here, too, water flooding doesn’t work due to bypass. Perhaps CHOPS is worth investigating for those fields. Some of the oil is as shallow as 400’ and demands a premium price over WTI.
Venezuela is a natural focus for such efforts given its proximity. About 15 years ago a company bought a field in Vz making around 400 bopd. A redevelopment with horizontal well bore quickly increased production to 40,000 bopd. Unfortunately the company had no incentive to increase production any further. Their contract with the Vz gov’t required the gov’t to receive 100% of all production greater than 40,000 bopd. Given the current Vz gov’t the technical difficulties may be overshadowed by the politics.