Friday, February 08, 2002
5:42 PM LINK
Oil Drilling Near Utah Parks
The New York Times had nice feature today by Timothy Egan about the Bush Administration's leasing of public lands near the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah for exploratory drilling of oil and gas. The article specifically mentions leases granted in the Lockhart Basin area.
The oil asserted that contrary to what one might hear on conservative talk radio, the Clinton Administration was actually a boom time for the opening up of public lands for drilling.
Oil derricks and drilling equipment have long been a feature on the nation's public lands,
with nearly 35 million acres open to development. During the Clinton years, oil and gas
leasing increased considerably over previous administrations. But areas considered
wilderness and areas near national parks were usually off- limits.
Along with describing the leases for the Utah lands, the article pointed out that Bush's new policy is that processing of oil and gas exploration leases are the number one priority for the Bureau of Land
Management's Utah offices:
``Utah needs to ensure that existing staff understand that when
an oil and gas lease parcel or when an application for
permission to drill comes in the door, that this work is their
No.1 priority,'' Bureau of Land Management supervisors wrote
to field officers in a memorandum a month ago.
Bush is an oil man. This is hardly a surprise.
Whether or not the drilling exactly takes place is another matter. The leases were granted last year when prices were high during the California Crunch. This year prices are much lower, making the drilling less feasible economically.
I wish the article had been forthright about preliminary geologic estimates of the recoverable oil and gas in the leases in the Lockhart Basin. Surely there must be some guesses.
Here's a site from the Wilderness Society about the Lockhart Basin. The leases have been granted to Legacy Oil of Denver
Legacy Energy Corporation, a privately held oil and gas exploration
company in Denver, Colorado, has two approved Applications for Permit
to Drill (APD) in the Basin and has acquired new leases in the Canyon
Rims Recreation Area on Hatch Point. In approving the wells and issuing
these leases, local BLM officials appear to be ignoring the natural values
that make this a special place.
I get the idea that no one has any estimate of amounts yet. It is still in the early stages of simply pounding the ground to see what might be there:
It would be tragic to destroy the nationally significant visual, wildlife, and
recreational resources of the area for such a small chance of striking oil.
The estimated success rate for discovery of oil in Lockhart Basin is only
14 percent.
Thursday, February 07, 2002
7:33 PM LINK
Venezuelan Oil is Heavy
Speaking of South American oil, I learned this fact about Venezuelan Oil from this this Congressional report by Joseph P. Riva in 1995:
Although Venezuela possesses very substantial oil resources, much of the oil is very heavy, making per-well production relatively low. Compared to the Middle East, substantially increasing Venezuelan oil production would require the drilling of many more wells at a much greater investment of money and time. Thus, it is only the Middle East that possesses sufficient reserves to increase oil production to the demand levels envisioned by EIA for the next 15 years.
The
cost of recovering additional oil is something you very rarely hear mentioned in discussions about petroleum in the major media. In my opinion, there's an unspoken crank attitude of "who cares, just get it." Mentioning the fact that recovery of petroleum is governed by
market forces seems almost, well, unpatriotic.
7:23 PM LINK
How much Oil Have We Used?
A couple days ago I mentioned that the current "official" estimates of the world's proven reserves of petroleum are almost exactly one trillion barrels.
What about the oil that is so far been recovered? How much have we actually drilled?
The answer: around 800 million barrels. That is, the current proven reservers world wide are about 25% greater than the amount recovered so far.
Sounds like we're sitting pretty right? Remember that most of the time that this oil was being recovered, the rate of usage was much less than it is now. Likewise demand in the future will continute climbing to ever greater levels.
7:15 PM LINK
Tom Tomorrow
One of Tom Tomorrow's readers wrote him complaining about his liberalism. The reader expressed this opinion about oil:
This weeks strip showed even more how really liberal and out of touch you are. I choose to drive an SUV so I am helping to finance terrorists, what a joke. If the tree huggers in this country would allow us to safely develope our OWN oil, we would not have to depend on foreign oil,
Wow. so untrue. The Bush-Cheney energy policy, however, seems predicated on keeping alive this legend of "energy independence th rough our own oil." The administration knows darn well that this is utterly impossible, but I have no doubt they will never publicly state this.
The "it's the environmentalists fault" argument is heard almost daily on Rush Limbaugh's radio program. It's so out-of-touch, it would be laughable if it weren't the basis of our national energy policy.
Wednesday, February 06, 2002
6:59 PM LINK
Drillbits and Tailings
Awesome site, highly recommended.
6:40 PM LINK
Colombian Oil
U.S. military mission in Colombia shifting towards protecting oil, claims Boston Globe.
The plan calls for $98 million to train and equip a Colombian army
brigade to protect the oil pipeline that carries oil belonging to Los
Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum from the country's
second-biggest oil field to the Caribbean coast. Rebel bomb attacks
on the 480-mile-long pipeline put it out of commission for 266
days last year
This is the Cano Lino pipeline, which began operating in 1986. It's the northeast province of Arauca. When it's in operation, it carries about 220,00 barrels per day. According to
this CNN report, it was attacked about 100 times by the National Liberation Army (ELN) in 2000.
The Colombian government is desperate to increase production, which has been falling steadily, threatening to turn the nation from an exporter to an importer within a few years, according to this report. The U'wa Indian community is very much against any expansion of the pipeline and has been seeking all legal ways of stopping further building of more lines.
The U'wa were very happy when Oxy's wells in the Gibraltar Concession came up dry.
Here's a map of the pipeline route from the "Oxy" site. Not surprisingly, the field is near the Venezuelan border (Colombia's reserves are small compared to its neighbhor). Originally the field held about 1.3 billion barrels, about 900,000 barrels of which have been pumped.
The Colombia state oil company Ecopetrol gets about 85% of the revenue from the field. You can see why they are desperate to find more oil.
Occidental meanwhile is in the process of building a 1.1 billion dollar pipeline in Ecuador.
Tuesday, February 05, 2002
3:50 PM LINK
Proven Reserves, a Definition
Good precise definiton of "proven reserves" means found at Energy Africa, a Zambian site:
Proven reserves means the amount of petroleum which geophysical, geological and engineering data indicate to be recoverable to a high degree of certainty. For the purposes of this definition, there is a 90% chance that the actual quantity will be more than the amount estimated as Proven and a 10% chance that it will be less.
Side note: Could there be much oil found in the interior of Africa? Nope. Africa is a remarkable stable land mass, historically, and most of it is a plateau that has never spent any time as a shallow sea bed.
2:43 PM LINK
ANWR is not among proven reserves
Just to illustrate how the concept of "proven reserves" works, note that ANWR is not counted among the U.S. portion of worldwide proven reserves. This is because nothing is proven yet. There are no wells drilled.
2:26 PM LINK
How Much Oil Total?
How much petroleum is there in the world? That is, how much is in the ground, left to recover?
Like anything in the oil business, coming up with hard numbers is not always easy. For one thing, there is more than one way to answer that question.
First of all, there's a difference between how much oil there is total in the ground, versus the total amount of proven reserves. "Proven reserves" indicates that amount that is recoverable from existing wells. That is, if no further wells are drilled, and if no further discoveries are made, the amount of proven reserves indicates the amount that could be recovered.
Each year, the total amount of proven reserves are published on a country by country basis in Oil and Gas Journal. Simply put, if you total these up, you will get the total amount of proven reserves for the entire world.
The published figure as of two years ago (the latest I could obtain) was about 1016 billion barrels, i.e., just over a trillion barrels of proven reserves world wide.
Note: That comes out to around 250,000 full loads of the Jahre Viking, the largest supertanker (ULCC) in existence.
Next question: How authortative are these figures?
Monday, February 04, 2002
1:31 PM LINK
Cynicism Relapse
I'm not a big fan of the "War of Drugs." I'm also a Cassandra when it comes to seeing "mission creep" in politics. My most cynical moment during the Super Bowl yesterday was during the government's "Buy illegal drugs, and you may be funding terrorism." commercials.
I couldn't help bluring out: "They might as well say, 'Buy gasoline, and you may be funding terrorism.' "
Of course, that's a ridiculous distortion, right?
12:40 PM LINK
The Old Soft Shoe on Alternative Fuels
This morning the Oil and Gas Journal is reporting that:
The Bush Administration will unveil its budget proposal next week for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1 and industry officials said Friday they hope the White House does not repeat last year's mistake of proposing deep cuts in government-funded oil and gas research....
The Bush administration proposed dramatic research cuts on oil, gas, and renewable fuels in favor of "clean" coal technologies. Research for oil and gas was slated to fall by 50% from $112 million in 2001 to $51.5 million in fiscal 2002. Congress, as the White House likely anticipated, later restored oil and gas funding close to 2001 levels...
Think it's odd that Bush proposed
cuts in oil and gas research? It makes
perfect sense politically. Notice what actually happened. Bush proposes increases in coal technology research, while cutting research into oil, gas, and renewable fuels, knowing that Congress will restore the oil and gas research outlays, which they did.
Net result: coal research gets a boost, while oil and gas research stays the same. Notice what got left out the equation? As a result of this chess game, only renewable energy research got cut. But Bush gets to avoid being labeled as a "alternative fuels budget cutter." Instead he gets a "hey look, I'm no friend of the oil and gas industry" merit badge for proposing the cuts, while letting Congress do the dirty work.
And people thought this guy was stupid!
Note: those are my quotation marks around "clean" coal. I've suspended judgement about global warming until I find out the truth to my satisfaction. I can certainly be fair by forgoing the coal industry's propaganda.
12:34 PM LINK
In the Company of Penguins
Getting mentioned on Matt Welch's warblog right next to Tom Tomorrow indeed makes my day.
11:27 AM LINK
Meet The Paraffins
The simple hydrocarbons have names. The ones consisting of straight chains of carbon atoms (surrounded by hydrogen atoms) have a systematic nomenclature based on the number of carbons present. Here are the first ten, the names of some of which you undoubtedly recognize:
| number of carbon atoms | name of molecule | state at room temp. |
| 1 | C | methane | gas |
| 2 | C-C | ethane | gas |
| 3 | C-C-C | propane | gas/liquid |
| 4 | C-C-C-C | butane | gas/liquid |
| 5 | C-C-C-C-C | pentane | liquid |
| 6 | C-C-C-C-C-C | hexane | liquid |
| 7 | C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C | heptane | liquid |
| 8 | C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C | octane | liquid |
| 9 | C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C | nonane | liquid |
| 10 | C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C | decane | liquid |
The simple hydrocarbons are called the paraffins, which sounds really down-home, but is actually based on a Latin phrase about their chemical properties..
These are the official names of just the lightest ten of the straight-chain hydrocarbons. Remember also there are branched versions with the same number of carbon atoms too. They have longer names, like "isobutane." If there weren't branched versions, driving petroleum-feuled cars would suck.
Stopping at ten carbon atoms was arbitrary. You can keep going up from there, no problem. The molecules get heavier as you add additional carbons to them. Because of this, once you start getting up to around twenty carbons or so, the resulting compound is a waxy nonmetallic solid, instead of liquid, at room temperature.
In popular usage, "paraffin" often just refers to the heavier solid hydrocarbons., but chemically speaking, it refers to the whole family of compounds, including the gaseous and liquid ones too.
You might have noticed octane in the table. I know what you're thinking: "that's gasoline!" Well, it's not that you'd be completely wrong by saying this. There is octane in gasoline. It's just that you'd only be partially right.
You might be thinking that it has something to do with the "octane rating" you see at gasoline pumps. Actually, you'd be incorrect in this regard. Octane ratings are calculated in a special way, and have a lot to do with the difference between straight and branched hydrocarbons.
