Open Access Article Originally Published: May 07, 2007
In his 36 years with BP, Jeremy Gilbert worked in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Iran,
Alaska, and the North Sea. In the late 1980s, Gilbert became BP's Chief Petroleum Engineer, with responsibility for all of BP's petroleum engineering worldwide. In this wide-ranging interview with ASPO-USA's Randy Udall, he reflects on the myriad challenges we face in forecasting the future course of
global oil production.
Q: A recent series of posts at www.theoildrum.com attempt to divine the
current status and future prospects of Saudi Arabia's Ghawar field, the world's
largest. Your thoughts?
A: I am amazed at the energy and diligence which the authors exhibit in
carrying out their analyses. It is tragic that the Saudis won't release more
detailed performance data and their own analyses which would show the situation
more clearly. It seems likely to me that the conclusion that Ghawar is in
decline is correct. But it's a big step to conclude that its decline will be
steep. Oil companies employ reservoir engineers and reservoir geologists to deal
with just the situation we have here: "a mature field is showing signs of
declining production with its current development, what can we profitably do
that might change this situation?"
Q: More than half the oil produced in Mexico is consumed in the U.S. In 2001,
PEMEX built the world's largest nitrogen injection plant to increase reservoir
pressure at Cantarell. Production doubled to nearly 2 million barrels a day, but
last year went into precipitous, apparently terminal decline. Would you, as a
petroleum engineer, have anticipated this result?
A: I'm quite sure that the Mexicans were well aware of the uncertainty
associated with gas flooding. There are many challenges associated with a
successful gas flood. These center on being able to control the advance of the
gas front. Because gas viscosity is so much less than that of the other
reservoir fluids it will tend to cone and to finger through oil saturated zones,
resulting in the premature breakthrough of injected gas into producing
perforations. Once gas breakthrough occurs, oil production from the partially
swept layer will decline very rapidly, and possibly completely.
Q: When do you expect global production to peak, and thereafter what do you
expect the average decline rate to be?
A: I expect to see a peak sometime before 2015, but I don't think we'll see a
simple maximum followed by a decline. I foresee a series of maxima, each
followed by a brief decline. The simplest analogue would be a sine wave. It may
be some time after the true peak before we can recognize it as such. Once one
starts talking about average decline rates for regions, countries, the world one
gets into a very murky place. Averaging is a dangerous process; averages hide
all sorts of anomalies and variations. As we've seen the post-plateau decline
rate for individual reservoirs can be as much as 15%/year. If we take the
decline rate for a region, where fields are at different stages in their
depletion and where some new reservoirs may be coming on stream then the decline
rate is more likely to be 4-8%/year. The higher rates will be seen in area where
exploration is effectively over, such as the U.K. Continental Shelf. Since the
world as a whole is less mature than the North Sea, I expect a lower decline
rate.
Q: You worked in Libya, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi. How much scope is there for
future discoveries in the Middle East?
A: There is still much scope for exploration in the Middle East, both in
deeper horizons than those currently developed and in stratigraphically more
complex areas. By their very nature these deep and complex reservoirs are likely
to be smaller and more expensive to develop than the relatively shallow,
relatively simple and generally large fields currently under production. For the
last few decades there has been little incentive for these countries to 'mature'
their exploration programs; they had access to so many discovered barrels that
there was no point in going to look for more. In Kuwait and Bahrein, the smaller
countries, the scope for additional oil to be discovered is fairly limited and
the deeper horizons are likely to be gas-prone but in Saudi, in Iraq and to a
lesser extent in Iran there could still be some pleasant surprises. This does
not mean that a peak in these countries' production can be deferred the delay
from exploration to exploitation is too long but it should mean that the
post-plateau decline rate will be low, probably less than 5%/year. And it won't
be 5% every year, there will be sharp variations.
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2 comments so far...
19-May-2007
56265
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It is refreshing to occasionally read thoughts gleaned from a mind that has had the technical training and field experience to speak with some validity on a topic often rife with emotional 'hotspeak'.
Posted by: David Park
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09-May-2007
56138
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A bumpersticker about the Iraq war asks: "What's our oil doing under their sand?"
Of course, the Bushites hotly denied that their disastrous war is about grabbing the second largest oil reserve in the world. "It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil," barked Donnie Rumsfeld!
Could that be yet another of their lies? Yes!
A cabal of Kleptocrats – including the Bushites, the Iraqi cabinet, and the major oil corporations – have drafted a new oil law requiring Iraq to open up its fields to control by Western corporations. This was kept secret from both the Iraqi and American people, but the draft has now been submitted to their parliament for its approval, so details of the thievery have leaked out.
The law would transform Iraq's huge oil reserve from a nationally-owned resource to a privatization model, opening two-thirds of the known oil fields to foreign control.
Instead of parliament making the major decisions over oil, an unelected authority called the Federal Oil and Gas Council would take charge. And guess who would have seats on this council? The major oil corporations!
This autocratic group would then decide who gets the contracts to extract the nation's oil. Yes... that means Big Oil would be approving its owns bids. Also, the corporations would not have to hire Iraqis, reinvest profits in Iraq, or share new technologies. Foreign interests would even be allowed to divvy up the territory now and hold their pieces of the action until after the current civil war settles down, then move in to grab profits.
This scheme is nothing but a license for Big Oil to plunder a nation and its people. So much for Bush & Company's rhetoric about "bringing democracy to Iraq." They're using our troops to give away Iraq's oil... and its sovereignty.
To learn more about this shameful ripoff, call the watchdog group: Oil Change International: 202-518-9029
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source: Jim Hightower.com
Posted by: Ishmael Harper
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