Tech Talk – More on Hydraulic Fracturing
There is a real, practical limit to the amount of oil that can be recovered from a reservoir. Depending on the availability and economic viability of different technical approaches, that limit might be less than 25% of the total volume of oil original...
Tech Talk – Improving Horizontal Well Flow at Berri and Ghawar
The very size of oil reservoirs in Saudi Arabia means that as the dominant method of water flooding is used to sweep oil to the producing wells, not all the oil in place migrates as hoped. Some remains in place and this makes up a very significant volu...
Tech Talk – Enhancing Production at Berri
In the last post I discussed how changing technologies were improving the recovery of the final significant volumes of oil from Abqaiq. New technologies have also brought additional life to the Berri field, which lies along the coast north of Abqaiq. B...
Tech Talk – Extracting the Attic Oil From Abqaiq
Current figures suggest that world liquid fuels production is running at around 90 mbd, of which roughly 74 mbd is crude. A reasonable estimate of the annual decline in existing well production lies at around 5%, so that each year new sources of oil mu...
Tech Talk – Production from Abqaiq, an Aging Queen
The topic of rising gas prices is pervasive, and at a breakfast meeting last Monday, Richard Williams, a friend, commented that he had seen some cores from Saudi Arabia, and that they looked so weak, he felt he could put his fist through them. It remin...
A Review of the Citigroup Prediction on US Energy
Gasoline prices remain high, and Reuters recently noted that there are enough countries with civil unrest, technical problems, and bad weather with around a million barrels a day of possible supply that are not getting to the market. Yet with Saudi Ara...
Tech Talk – Saudi Arabian Oil Production: Part 2
There is some debate in the mainstream press about the relative causes and impacts of the rising gasoline price on the overall economy. (I paid $4.40 per gallon in Silicon Valley on Sunday, though only $3.67 in mid-Missouri today). As noted in my previ...
Tech Talk – Going Back to the First Look at Saudi Arabian Oil Production
The United States Government has just asked the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) to raise the levels of its oil production in summer 2012. Oil production is otherwise anticipated to be at some 9.8 mbd this summer, with fluctuations of around 200 kbd about...
Tech Talk – A Recap in Light of Iranian Sanctions and Canadian Production Estimates
This series of posts has just completed a review of the different regions of Russian oil production, with the conclusion that while Russia may maintain current production levels of around 10.4 mbd for a short time, it faces rising domestic consumption ...
Tech Talk – Future Russian Fuel Production from the Arctic
In the past few weeks I have been looking at the potential for sustainability in oil and gas production in Russia, now at a predicted recent peak of 10.36 mbd, when condensate is included. But the question increasingly becomes whether or not Russia can...
Tech Talk – Future Natural Gas Production from Western Siberia
The bitterly cold weather in parts of Europe over the past few weeks has had an impact on power consumption. Russia saw the highest demand yet for electricity at 156.96 Gigawatts, while at the same time reducing the volumes of natural gas that it is su...
Tech Talk – Oil Production from Timan-Pechora
In the review of the BP view of energy supply over the next 20 years, I noted BP anticipated that Europe would be largely self-sufficient in Energy:
we foresee both the Americas and Eurasia - or Europe including Russia and the former Soviet Union - ach...
