Latest guess, from someone who has a clue about such issues, on where production is going in North Dakota is somewhere around 1.5M or 1.6M barrels a day late this year or early next year.
Huge finds off coast of Guyana and in New Mexico/Texas.
Question needs to be asked again: What Peak Oil?
The Million Dollar Way – 7/7/19 – ND Oil Production to Surge – Lynn Helms. Citing another source, the article says Lynn Helms, director of DMR, thinks production in North Dakota will surge later this year after gas infrastructure construction is done.
Five more reasons Saudi Arabia is in a jam and American pipelines are overfull. There will be many more reasons on that site before all the drilling is done. Oh, check out that gorgeous sky. Photo by James Ulvog.
A few articles that caught my interest over the last months on energy issues:
Another new field with one and half or two billion barrels of oil that not even the energy wizards were sure was there – Oh yeah, what Peak Oil?
Saudi Arabia cracks down
Two billion a year is consumed for lifestyle support stipends paid to every descendant of the house of Saud
Pipeline capacity is constraint for otherwise expanding shale production
US hit crude export level of 1 million barrels a day this past summer
What Peak Oil?
7/12/17 – Houston Chronicle – Houston’s Talos Energy makes ‘significant’ find in Mexico’s waters – Two years ago the Mexican government allowed private companies to start exploring for oil in the country. The improved freedom for private companies to do what private companies do is paying off.
On 7/12 Talos Energy announced the “Zama-1” exploratory well has confirmed a new find which is estimated to hold between 1.4 billion and 2.0 billion barrels of oil-in-place.
Oil that can now be pulled from under the ocean to provide energy to a fuel-hungry world.
Wells being drilled by that rig have long since gone into operation and contributed their share to increased US production.
The impact of fracking is massive. Large increases in production of natural gas and crude oil has created a long list of favorable economic and environment impacts.
7/6/17 – Victor Davis Hanson at National Review – The Fracking Industry Deserves Our Gratitude– Prof. Hanson provides a fast survey of how much fracking has improved the American economy. Fracking is the combination of horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing.
The impact of fracking is staggering.
Ten years ago eeeeeeverybody knew for an absolute certainty that Peak Oil was here and we were about to run out of oil. The Secretary of Energy was wishfully musing that gasoline would rise from $4 to $10 a gallon.
In the last five years, gasoline prices are down about $1.50 a gallon, surge in natural gas production displaced coal consumption which has reduced our CO2 output by 12% in the last decade (surpassing the EU in cuts), and reduced our oil imports by five million barrels a day.
15 wells on 1 pad. Notice a drilling rig on right edge of view. September 2015 photo by James Ulvog.
Yeah, I’m still new to this effort of watching the energy field. One of the things that still amazes me is the frequency with which the geology wizards find another billion or so barrels of recoverable oil that ‘we’ didn’t know about and a decade ago couldn’t get out of the ground profitably even if the wizards had known for sure it was there.
First production is expected in 2021, four years from now. Production level expected to hit 120,000 bopd, or 43.8M barrels a year.
Oh, what Peak Oil?
By the way, I’m having a hard time keeping track of all these massive new finds of oil which either nobody knew about a decade ago or it would have been technically impossible to ever get any of it out of the ground.
In a decade or so, will we get to see thousands of these above the Green River Formation? Photo of Bakken pump jack by James Ulvog.
Here’s another brain stretcher for you in the realm of the open frontier in energy – how about using microwave to tease oil shale out of the ground?
11/4 – Oxy – Move Over Fracking, There’s a New Technology in Town– First, keep in mind that oil shale is not the same as shale oil. I have to wrap my brain around that every time the topic of oil shale comes up.
Shale oil is crude oil that is trapped in rocks. Fracking is the way to get shale oil out of the ground.
Oil shale is sort-of-like crude oil stuff (actually kerogen, but that label doesn’t register for me) that has to be heated, or cooked, out of the rock. Usually done by strip mining then cooking the stuff. Other option is steam injection to liquefy the oil shale which then can be pulled out of the well. Fracking won’t do the trick.
Try this on for size: Using microwaves comparable to the power of 500 household machines to heat the rock turning the oil shale liquid. The water, which is mixed in with the kerogen will be converted to steam, which in turn will help pull the liquefied oil to the wellbore.
We’re gonna’ see a whole lot more of those things in Texas over the next few decades. Photo by James Ulvog.
Oh, by the way, the geology wizards just discovered another twenty billion barrels of recoverable oil where the wizards knew something existed but had no idea how much.
Twenty billion barrels. Billion, with a B.
11/15 – Star-Telegram – Permian’s Wolfcamp formation called biggest shale oil field in US – Estimate from USGS is the Wolfcamp formation in the Permian Basin holds 20 billion barrels of oil. There are four layers of shale that make up Wolfcamp. That puts this find somewhere in the range of three times the size of the entire Bakken formation in North Dakota.
Smith Bay drilling site. Image courtesy Caelus Energy LLC, used with permission.
There are two big finds in the last few weeks of fields with a few billion barrels of recoverable oil each where the petroleum engineers didn’t realize there were billions of barrels of oil.
Still needs to be a lot of work to develop the fields, but major point is the wizards know today there is somewhere around 5 billion more barrels of oil “we” can use to power our comfortable industrialized life than the wizards knew about a month ago.
Not that it is really necessary, but those two big finds prove yet again that Peak Oil is a busted, bankrupt, invalid theory.
10/5 – New York Times – Oil Glut? Here Comes Some More! – Author spends the first one-fifth of the article bemoaning the discovery of two new oil fields (yeah, I eye-balled the amount of pixels allocated to bemoaning).
The last thing the world needs is more oil and gas he points out, while typing at his coal-powered computer, which was constructed with plastic made from cracked natural gas, his words stored on a server farm powered by natural gas, his article delivered around the world at the speed of light, visible to me on my nuclear power driven monitor, which I read in my natural gas warmed office.
Amazing things are happening at the energy open frontier. Vaca Muerta is a huge shale gas field in Argentina that I doubt will be a big player anytime soon. US passes Russia as largest oil & gas producer and OPEC revenue slumps.
(Photo by James Ulvog. Four wells on a pad was big news only a short while ago. Now 4 is a small site.)
Only 10 oil fields have surpassed a production level of one million barrels a day. Currently three of them are running in the U.S.: Bakken, Eagle Ford, and Permian.
I’ve been wanting to find a source for Eagle Ford production. After reading a Carpe Diem post (which I can’t find again), I found a great source: the Energy Information Administration’s Drilling Productivity Report. Check out the second tab, Production by region, and the report data on the right side of the page.
Here is the production for the three top regions, in average daily production for each month from January 2007 through September 2014. Data for the last three months is estimated.
If you want to see what a radical change is underway in the energy field, check out this graph of combined oil production from the three biggest plays, Bakken, Eagle Ford, and Permian:
A few articles on technology, energy, and publishing that are worth a read and a brief comment. Reusable first stages of rockets, several updates on Yutu (Chinese lunar rover), commercial drones, lightly armed drones, and another shale field with big potential.
Education
3/4 – The Feed – Home-Schooling for Higher Ed – Mentioned this idea before. How ‘bout hiring a college professor to privately tutor you for your first year of college. Read the article and think about it a few minutes. Intriguing idea, huh?
Okay, I’m using a very loose definition of field. But check out the following graph of combined oil production from those five states. We’re talking production level of super-giant fields.
