"In the Arabian Gulf we have serious problems of maturity in many of these fields" Sadad al Husseini, ASPO USA interview, Denver CO, 12 October 2009

North Sea petroleum (oil+natural gas) production from 1970 to 2008 can be modeled to fit two Hubbert cycles. The first cycle represents surge production from the giant UK oil fields, Forties, Brent, Piper and Ninian. Actual cumulative production was 9937 million tonnes oil equivalent (mmtoe) 1970-2008 whilst the area beneath the two Hubbert curves is 9665 mmtoe - a difference of 2.7%.

To what extent the second Hubbert cycle will describe the decline in oil and gas production is highly pertinent but also uncertain. There are signs that the decline trajectory has already been influenced by a third cycle of giant field development with the Buzzard oil field and Ormen Lange gas field both coming on stream in 2007. The impact of this third cycle is shown below the fold.

There are times when new technologies are proposed as being better ways of drilling for oil and natural gas. However, to understand how these are better (or more likely not) than existing technologies, you have to know how the industry commonly drills through rock. There are two basic ways of doing so, depending on how hard the rock is. The first is the one that made the Hughes family very rich (if you ever saw the film The Aviator, Howard Hughes extravaganzas were paid for because his father had invented an effective way of drilling oil wells). The other, somewhat slower, was developed the last time that we had an energy crisis, and uses artificial diamonds, in the main, to gouge into and scrape off thin layers of rock.

Before I describe the diamond bit, let me borrow a bit from a post I did four years ago, and describe the idea behind the Hughes bit, which for reasons that I will explain, is usually referred to as a tri-cone bit.

I have put together a number of tech talks in the past. This is the first in a series of updates.

This is a guest post by Jean Laherrère, the second of a series on the current knowledge of the deepwater Oil and Gas reserve at the Gulf of Mexico. In this second installment Jean analyses the Methane Hydrate resource of the region, in face of recent claims of great drilling results in the region.

The first article of the series, on the conventional Oil and Gas reserve, can be found here. Thanks to ace's diligence an error was identified and corrected, resulting in an update to the graph on Commulative Oil and Gas Discovery over 400 meters deep.