When will the oil run out? Decades ago, the world had already warned that its reserves were coming to an end. Today there is more oil than necessary. What feeds the growth of black gold?
Carter Television
On the evening of April 18, 1977, US President Jimmy Carter invited television journalists to the Oval Office of the White House and ominously announced to the American people that today he wants to talk on an unpleasant topic about an unprecedented issue in the history of the United States. He spoke of the biggest threat to national security since the war.
The unprecedented issue that was discussed was energy. Or rather, her lack. According to the 39th president of the United States, the oil crisis made it necessary to balance energy demand due to the rapid decline in resources. Depleted hydrocarbon reserves, accounting for 75% of all energy sources in the country. The president even called the time when the oil runs out - this should have happened in the next 6-7 years.
Carter's performance was met with no enthusiasm. The Americans did not appreciate the apocalyptic message, and even less - his vision of a way out of this situation with the edifying demand of collective moral support. But hardly anyone doubted the facts given.
And yet the US president was wrong. The data on oil and natural gas reserves turned out to be incorrect. Energy resources were not only running out, they were, if not endless, then incomprehensibly huge. Nobody knew this then, but today many people know about it.
How much oil is enough?
In addition to the abundant hydrocarbon deposits in North America, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East producing countries, there are significant untouched deposits in South America, Africa and the Arctic: not billions of barrels, but trillions. Thus, it is too early to wonder what will happen when the oil runs out. On the contrary, according to a Harvard University report, the world is moving towards a supersaturation of hydrocarbons.
A 75-page study by an expert and former top manager of Eni, Leonardo Moggeri, which analyzes the development and exploitation of oil fields around the world, predicts a 20 percent increase in global production by 2020.
In particular, the report highlighted:
- deepwater deposits in the Brazilian Santos basin, which are believed to contain at least 150 billion barrels of oil ;
- Venezuelan deposits of "superheavy" oil of tar sands of Orinoco, estimated at 1.2 trillion barrels;
- oil sandstones of Canada;
- Kwanza pool in Angola,
- as well as the Bakken and Three Forks deposits in North Dakota and Montana in the United States, which, according to Mogger, could become the equivalent of Gulf countries.
And the reason for this boom? A technological revolution that is transforming the search and production of oil.
“Today, industry is able to see what it hasn’t seen before and to find what it didn’t find before,” said Gerald Shotman, Shell’s technology director at The Hague. “But we are also able to get more out of these stocks, taking a more reasonable approach to how we deal with them.”
shale oil
One of the greatest achievements and methods of oil production, which has dominated the news in recent years, both in a positive and negative way, was the technology of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. In essence, this is a method of releasing hydrocarbons contained in shale rocks using extremely powerful water pumps that create pressures up to 14 t / sq. m. Hydraulic fracturing was first used in Kansas in the forties of the last century, but only recently due to numerous improvements in the cost of oil production in this way has fallen so much that the technology has become economically viable. Minerals, previously considered unrecoverable, are now within our reach.
Nowhere are these achievements exploited with more enthusiasm than in the United States. Within six years, the number of barrels extracted from the Bakken formation, a shale field covering an area of about 518 thousand square meters. km, stretching from Montana to North Dakota, increased 100-fold - from 6 thousand to 600 thousand per day - and made North Dakota the second largest oil producer in the United States after Texas. The population of the main city of Williston over the past 10 years has tripled. Truck drivers and oil workers from all over the country, suffering from the recession, rushed here. New businesses and new hospital departments open up in North Dakota, followed by infrastructure, groaning under the weight of an influx of people. Environmental groups have carried out vocal campaigns against fracking, claiming that this technology pollutes underground water sources, causes local earthquakes and damages the environment with a large amount of toxic effluents.
Proponents of fracking insist that these dangers can be largely limited. And they point to the enormous advantages of the revolutionary method. The boom in North Dakota and the rapid transformation of the United States from a net energy importer into a net exporter have reduced the country's reliance on Middle East energy. Oil companies in China, Russia and Argentina, impressed by the results of the United States, themselves begin to implement this technology. Linc Energy has announced plans to produce 233 billion barrels of oil from shale in the Australian outback.
Tar sand
But what to do when shale oil runs out? Cracking is just one of many great breakthroughs behind a new boom. Helping to extract hard-to-recover oil, the technology found a way to get it from a mixture of sand and clay, known as tar or oil sandstone, the largest deposits of which are found in Canada.
Like shales, hydrocarbon production was previously economically disadvantageous, but new processes that include steam heating of sands have made the technology more attractive. Canada currently produces up to 1.9 million barrels per day of oil produced in this way, although, like fracking, the method has caused great protests. Al Gore, an environmental activist, described tar sandstones as “the dirtiest source of liquid fuel imaginable,” and called plans to build a new large oil pipeline from Alberta fields to Texas Gulf refineries “crazy.”
Horizontal drilling
The oil boom is also fueled by new, more accurate drilling methods. The invention of the horizontal method means that a place on the surface is a few kilometers from the target. Companies can drill down and then turn to the side to get to the desired point. A tower located in the open sea at a distance of 500 km from the coast can pass the rock 7 km down and 7 km to the side and go exactly to the desired location. In short, this means that it is almost impossible to drill a dry well. For example, in 2011, drilling success was successful in 99% of cases.
The problems of superdeep wells
Oil companies are drilling more deeply than ever before. Drilling rig “Hawk” on the island of Sakhalin near the eastern coast of Russia has set many industrial records, including drilling wells with ultra-long deviation depth of 12 345 m, which exceeds the size of Mount Everest.
At the moment, simple geometry prevents drilling to much greater depths. As Lance Cook, Shell’s COO of China, explained, the wells should be strengthened with steel so that they do not collapse, but the only way to lower the steel casing is to make the diameter of each subsequent pipe slightly smaller than the previous one.
This is what imposes restrictions on the depth. “If the company wanted to drill a thirty-kilometer well right now, then, say, the first casing must be larger than the building I'm sitting in,” says Cook.
Progress, however, has an irresistible impulse to move forward, and what seems staggering today will be old-fashioned tomorrow. Over the past 10 years, Shell has developed mono-diameter technology that will allow casing to be lowered inside each other and then expanded to the same size. In theory, this will help to drill deeper wells, although engineers still need to figure out how to prevent pipes from melting at such depths. By the time the oil of available fields runs out, and this problem will certainly be resolved.
Search for hydrocarbons: seismic vessels
As for the question of exactly where the oil deposits are located, the search for answers is ongoing. Geologists, at least, know where it is not worth looking for. Hydrocarbons are formed from tiny decomposed plants, algae and bacteria that exist to the level of the continental shelf, but never go beyond it, so oil drilling in the middle of the ocean will be meaningless.
Closer to the ground, however, the so-called. seismic vessels stretch from 10 to 20 cables, each 15 km long, acoustically probing the space for the presence of oil and gas fields. “However, what they move, they are the largest man-made facilities on Earth,” said Robin Walker, vice president of marketing for WesternGeco, which owns several of these vessels. And they are really huge. The largest of them, Ramform Sterling, does not belong to WesternGeco, but to the Norwegian PGS and carries 400 tons of highly sensitive electronic equipment on board an area of 830 football fields.
Each seismic vessel uses an air gun to create acoustic pulses of compressed air in the water. Sound waves are then reflected from the pitfalls and collected by a seismic streamer equipped with underwater microphones. Studying these data, geologists compile maps of deposits and determine whether they are filled with oil, gas or just water.
In the seventies, seismic vessels were converted fishing boats, and the technology was only two-dimensional. Today they are built on purpose, cost up to $ 200 million and use three-dimensional visualization, which greatly improved their accuracy. This method is not infallible. Cables are sometimes hopelessly confused. “This is the largest spaghetti in the world,” Walker says. “It takes several weeks to unravel them.” But still the level of complexity is breathtaking. ”
Space costs
“What happens there is the marine equivalent of a space program,” said Robert Bruce, an American writer and journalist specializing in energy. “And all this is funded from private sources.”
The amounts involved here can turn anyone's head on. In total, exploration and production companies spend more than $ 1 billion in just one year. Shell, for example, pays £ 63 million for exploration rights over 13,000 square meters. km off the east coast of Canada. This would not have been possible without extensive data on the presence of hydrocarbons, but in many respects the most striking proposal in the press release announcing the conclusion of the transaction was the following: “Shell stated that it remains to be determined whether its new sections contain oil or natural gas". How much would Shell pay if it knew for sure?
Santos Pool
Competition among businessmen, operators, searchers and intermediaries is extremely fierce. Everyone wants to get their share, and managers are forced to buy rights quickly.
One of the most fierce battlefields over the past two decades is Brazil. Previously, the Santos Basin, an area of the ocean 320 km southeast of São Paulo, could not be examined for the presence of oil due to the thick layer of salt, as it does not transmit vibrations well. But the development of seismology suddenly made the area the target of energy-producing corporations, and in 1999 the oil company Petrobras found a field here containing about 700 million barrels.
Kwanzaa Pool
The success in Brazil prompted geologists to peer across the Atlantic Ocean into the subsalt formations of Angola. Knowing that the coast of Brazil 100 million years ago adjoined the West coast of Africa, they believed that similar reserves could exist there. In February 2012, these theories were confirmed by the discovery of a field in the Kwanza basin, whose capacity reaches about 1.5 billion barrels. Since then, many oil companies, including BP and Total, have secured exploration rights in Angola.
Successful bidders did not disclose the size of the so-called subscription bonuses, but we can safely assume that they were huge. In 2006, the Chinese giant Sinopec set a world record by paying $ 1.1 billion for one offshore section. How much of this money goes to the people of Angola is a moot point. The history of oil exploration in Africa is not very happy. The country takes a modest 168th place out of 182 states in the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index.
It would be naive to believe that the genie could someday be driven back into the bottle. As Robert Bryce says, the world works on oil, that’s the point. No other substance can compete with it when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling and ease of transportation. If oil did not exist, then it should be invented.