Is the technology discussed in this article proven or just pie in the sky?
If it is feasible then I see great opportunity in North American companies sitting on vast pools of original oil in place that can now be exploited.
Back to the well
NEIL REYNOLDS
theglobeandmail.com
From Friday's Globe and Mail
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November 23, 2007 at 6:22 AM EST
OTTAWA — Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company, announced a couple of weeks ago the discovery of a huge offshore oil field - described as the second-biggest discovery of conventional crude anywhere in the world in the past 20 years.
Known as Tupi, the field holds more than eight billion barrels of oil, only slightly less than Norway's entire reserves. Business Monitor International says that Tupi will enable Brazil to export a million barrels of oil a day within five years, enough to get Brazil full membership in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Brazil has confirmed already that it's thinking about it.
Oddly enough, though, the biggest discovery of conventional oil this year went largely ignored - notwithstanding the fact that it took place in the continental U.S., where such things are not supposed to happen. The U.S. National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) made the relevant announcement earlier this year as follows: "Researchers at Texas A&M [University] and the Department of Energy have produced a new computer tool that will increase recovery of as much as 218 billion barrels of bypassed oil remaining in mature domestic fields."
Two hundred and eighteen billion barrels of conventional oil. Note that this is almost 10 times the proven reserves (22 billion barrels) of the United States. Note that this is enough to run the U.S. economy for the next 25 years. And note that this isn't a reference to all the oil left behind when wells ran "dry" - a resource that exceeds 300 billion barrels. This is a measure of the "bypassed oil" that, with advances in technology, can now be deemed recoverable. At $100 (U.S.) a barrel, it would be worth more than $20-trillion. And it's all sitting there, in known places, in old oil wells - hundreds of thousands of them - that are now regarded, for all practical purposes, as empty holes in the ground.
NETL, operating from six research campuses across the U.S., is the only government-owned research laboratory that works exclusively on fossil-fuel technology. It funds research into EOR - "enhanced oil recovery" - for a number of reasons. One is simply the vast amounts of oil that have been left behind. ("More than two-thirds of all the oil ever discovered in America," it says, "remains in the ground.") Another is that the vast majority of "depleted" wells are too small to interest the big oil companies.
NETL develops technology to help small, independent companies pursue this abandoned oil. More than 7,000 of these companies are already pumping oil from depleted - to say nothing of deleted - wells: "Much bypassed oil lies in difficult-to-access pockets," NETL says. "Predicting the size and locations of these elusive deposits is costly." So the lab financed the development of sophisticated software that will guide these oil-salvage companies in the hunt. Along with computer-driven mapping, the lab has developed "tracer tests" - using coloured liquids and gases to track pathways within a well. Were each of these entrepreneurial outfits to recover 200 barrels a day, the U.S. would gain more oil than it imports from Canada.
In Alberta, the oil sands were widely regarded, 30 years ago, as an impossible challenge technically and economically. But production costs in the oil sands have fallen from $35 a barrel to $5 a barrel. Production has increased from 100,000 barrels a day in 1980 to a million barrels a day. In Brazil, the Tupi oil field became "visible" only after the development of sensors that look through thick layers of salt. The Task Force on Strategic Unconventional Fuels (unconventionalfuels.org), set up by the U.S. government to report on fossil fuel resources, concluded that the United States can recover an extra 1.3 million barrels of oil a day through "enhanced recovery" from old wells with existing technology - or an extra three million barrels a day with advances in technology.
These examples are all from the supply-side of oil. Cars, though, will get more efficient even as oil supplies expand. A couple of weeks ago in Los Angeles, General Motors vice-chairman Bob Lutz showed off Chevrolet's new fuel-efficient hybrid Silverado and Tahoe models and GMC's fuel-efficient hybrid Yukon. He showed off, in other words, GM's fuel-efficient gas-guzzlers. In his comments, Mr. Lutz called on the U.S. Congress to trust technology - not legislation - to reduce the country's reliance on imported oil. "We will do whatever they tell us to do," Mr. Lutz said, referring to congressional intervention. "[But] I feel compelled to say that this is not the right strategy."
The fact is we don't need legislation to end the energy crisis. The oil companies and the car companies have got us pretty well covered - upstream and downstream, coming and going.
nreynolds@xplornet.com |
