Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Ignacy Łukasiewicz, a Polish pharmacist, followed
Gesner's work and became the first chemist to distill ker-
osene from oil. America's first oil well was hand-dug near
Black Creek hamlet in a swamp in Lambton County in
southwestern Ontario in 1858 by Charles Tripp and
James Miller Williams. Percussion drilling, powered by a
steam engine, was used for the first commercial Western
oil well by Colonel Edwin L. Drake at Oil Creek in
Pennsylvania on August 27, 1859, generally considered
the beginning of modern oil era. The well penetrated 10
m of rock to strike oil at a depth of 21 m (Brantly 1971).
Kerosene shipments expanded rapidly during the
1860s, but the total consumption of refined oil products
for lighting, heating, and lubrication grew slowly during
the decades of rapid coal-mining expansion before 1900.
This pioneering era bequeathed us a unit whose universal
use has resisted replacement by a metric measure: a barrel
of oil. Abbreviated as bbl (originally for blue barrel, the
standard container of 42 U.S. gallons), this volume mea-
sure was adopted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census in
1872 and is used worldwide both for crude oil reserves
and production. The different densities of crude oils pre-
clude a single conversion rate to mass. Crude oils den-
sities range from 740 kg/m
3
to 1040 kg/m
3
, and 1 t
thus equals 6.04-8.5 bbl. Most oils fall between 7 bbl/t
and 7.5 bbl/t; 7.33 bbl/t is a common average, and BP
uses 7.35 bbl/t (BP 2005).
Systematic estimates of the world's oil resources and
reserves became possible once some exploratory drilling
had been done in most of the world's promising oil prov-
inces. World Oil and Oil & Gas Journal publish annual
surveys of world oil reserves, and these, together with
various primary sources and OPEC data, have been used
to prepare BP's annual worldwide summary (BP 2006).
The increase in global crude oil reserves during the third
quarter of the twentieth century was particularly spectac-
ular, from 85 Gbbl in 1950 to 715 Gbbl in 1974. By the
late 1990s the total had surpassed 1 Tbbl, and in 2005 it
was at least 1.19 Tbbl (BP 2005). Just five Persian Gulf
countries, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and United
Arab Emirates, had about 60% of this total. The richest
deposits outside the Middle East were in Russia and Ven-
ezuela (each about 6% of the total) and in Libya and
Kazakhstan (each about 3%).
The worldwide R/P ratio has undergone major shifts
since the end of WW II, when it stood at just 20 years
(fig. 8.2). New discoveries pushed the ratio to nearly 40
years by the late 1950s, and after a period of decline and
fluctuation, it reached a low of 26 years in 1979. Then it
recovered and rose to more than 40 years by the end of
the 1980s. At the beginning of 2005 it stood at 44 years,
according to Oil & Gas Journal, or at 40.5 years, accord-
ing to BP. This is a remarkable achievement. The difficult
process of discovering and developing new oil reserves
was not only able to maintain the global R/P ratio above
25 years but actually to increase it above 40 years despite
the nearly 12-fold rise of global oil extraction between
1945 and 2005.
But this is not a universally shared appraisal. Unfortu-
nately, absence of rigorous and uniform international
standards in reporting oil reserves makes it certain that
many national totals reported by these surveys are sus-
pect, and this makes the global R/P ratios questionable.
Reserve assessments lump figures for proved reserves
with 50% probability estimates (P50 amounts that are as
likely as not to be produced by a well or an oil field over
its lifetime) and with estimates of possible reserves (prob-
abilities exceeding these amounts are only 10% or 5%).
After sifting through the world's most extensive oil
field database, Campbell and Laherr`re (1998) concluded
