Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
global oil production will break through de Margerie's 100m b/d barrier.
In its 2009 annual outlook, the IEA estimates that, on current trends,
world oil output will rise from 84.6m b/d in 2008 to 88.4m b/d in 2015, to
reach 105.2m b/d by 2030.
Running to stay still
New recovery methods have helped, but the gain in recovery rates barely
compensates for an increasing rate of decline in existing fields. (Indeed
enhanced recovery techniques may only accelerate the decline rate, ena-
bling operators to suck out the oil quicker than before.) The reason for
decline rates outpacing recovery gains is simple. The volume of oil in new
discoveries fell behind the volume of production in the 1980s, and stayed
there ever since. The new fields that are discovered tend to be smaller;
earlier discoveries tended to be bigger fields because by definition they
were easier to spot.
The IEA has found that smaller fields deplete quicker. In a massive sur-
vey of 580 of the world's largest fields that are past their peak, the agency
found an average 5.1 percent annual rate of decline, ranging from 3.4 per-
cent for “super-giant” fields to 10.4 percent for merely “large” fields. The
cause of the differing decline rates may have more to do with policy than
geology or technology. For decline rates are lowest in the Middle East,
where national oil companies tend to want to husband national resources,
and highest in North America where developers are often in a commercial
hurry to recover their costs with rapid production.
An enormous amount of investment would be needed to offset these
decline rates in oil supply - far more than would be needed to meet any
conceivable increase in oil demand. To offset the decline rates, it is esti-
mated that the world would have to bring on stream an extra 64m b/d of
capacity between now and 2030 - roughly six times that of Saudi Arabia
today - just to keep output steady.
Going offshore
Britain only has one sizeable onshore oil operation Wytch Farm and even
that consists mainly of drilling horizontally to reach oil underneath Poole
harbour in Dorest. So it had little choice but to go offshore in its search
for oil
Over the past 41 years the UK has extracted nearly 39bn barrels of
oil or oil equivalent (including gas), mainly from the North Sea, with its
gas fields in the southern part and oil fields in the northern part. Oil and
.
 
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