Technique could add “tens of billion of barrels” to Saudi oil reserves — WSJ
Technique could add “tens of billion of barrels” to Saudi oil reserves — WSJ
mongabay
July 10, 2006
An oil recovery technique using steam injection could add “tens of billion of barrels” to Saudi Arabia’s reserves said Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
The paper reports that earlier this year U.S.-based Chevron Corp. began a field test of a technique that could pump heavy crude oil that previously considered unrecoverable. The technique uses steam injection to loosen up heavy-oil deposits in existing oil wells.
Chevron has used the technique in other parts of the world to boost production of heavy oil. A Chevron engineer told the paper that the oil firm was able to recover “80% of the oil from some reservoirs in the California oil fields, compared with 15% in the pre-steam days.” The Saudi government hopes the process will produce similar results in the oil-rich kingdom — some estimate that yields could jump from 3% to 40% in the Wafra oil field.
High prices change energy economics
The story shows that high oil prices will continue to drive drillers to pursue traditionally marginal sources of energy, even ones that a particularly difficult to recover and refine. In the case of heavy oils. which are more costly to bring to the surface than light oils, their high content of impurities like metals and sulfur require special refining equipment to convert the crude into useful products like gasoline, jet fuel and heating oil.
 Photo by Rhett A. Butler |
High oil prices make other sources of energy — ranging from biofules to solar energy to fossil fuels like liquefied coal, tar sands, frozen methane hydrates — economically viable. However, the use of some of these energy sources could have secondary costs, notably greenhouse gas pollution that will contribute further to global climate change.
In a paper written earlier this year, researchers from the Earth Institute at Columbia University said that this does not have to be the case, arguing that coal, tar sands, and oil shale can be extracted and used at a lower cost to the environment than some might expect. They noted that given the abundant supply of alternative energy sources, over the long-term, the limiting factor presented in increased use of fossil fuels “is environmental rather than one of availability.”
Nevertheless, it seems likely that as long as fossil fuels are available in the ground and available at a lower cost than other energy sources, someone is going to exploit them. One of the most important areas of research in the future will be minimizing the global impact of this use.
This article used information from “Saudi Arabia Tests Its Potential For Unlocking Heavy-Oil Reserves” by BHUSHAN BAHREE in New York and RUSSELL GOLD. The article appeared in the July 10, 2006 edition of The Wall Street Journal.