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how about major fields discovered?
It is good to have differing opinions but you haven't pointed out what major fields have been discovered recently as an example.
westeffer,
your comments are nonsensical.
1.Cantrell is an example of reservoir mismanagement. Its production problems have nothing to do with recovery techniques eroding "the reserve base to [sic] quickly".
2. Your claim that "all major fields were discovered at least 40 to 50 years ago" is laughable
3. and in the 'are you serious?' category: "People get excited about the huge deep salt deposits potential off Brazil and yet the oil industry doesn't even have the drilling bits that can drill through the salt."
4. 'refinery challenges' have nothing to do with challenges involved in increasing production from Canadian oil sands.
Congratulations, you are a winner of getting absolutely nothing correct.
never hurts to have an inside man ;^)
http://www.cheniere.com/corporate/directors.shtml
This BQI company ... - has a total of about 10 billion barrels of oil , due to recovery rates - lets say 5 billion barrels
re: Duke fracking paper
i had to review the paper as part of my job so i can't pass on detailed comments from that exercise; however, here are a couple of sites that address most of the pertinent problems:
http://www.energyindepth.org/tag/report/
http://johnhanger.blogspot.com/2011/05/comments-on-duke-university-study.html
the PNAS authors have also starting writing op-ed pieces in newspapers which seem to further expose their lack of objectivity:
http://articles.philly.com/2011-05-10/news/29528421_1_water-wells-safe-drinking-natural-gas
The PNAS paper is an embarrassingly bad piece of 'science' unfortunately, i suspect that the authors' funding position will benefit. Mine will probably as well; however, i'm not the guy prostituting himself.
enjoy,
Charlie
i've seen a bunch of buses in our 'beloved' Cambridge that run on NG and Obama bought nice new NG fueled taxis for the local cab companies; however, i have seen zero NG fueled garbage trucks - anywhere.
the original article is here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/02/1100682108.full.pdf+html
i'll comment more later when i've thought it over a bit.
he also was an SLB director and has many more shares than me.
DOE frack panel
i suspect obama will get something quite different than what he expects. From a superficial perspective the panel is composed of a mix of quasi-industry, environmental, and academic 'experts'. I know most of the people on the panel are very liberal and i suspect all are of that persuasion, however, that doesn't matter much beyond that they'll give obama something they think he wants. What is more important and is a shared goal of the panel members is that they all want higher natural gas prices - whether they want that explicitly or not. The large multinational production and service companies that have been expanding or trying to expand their operations in shale gas will also be quite happy with the higher price goal. So the stars are aligned for everyone but those whose are crimped by higher natural gas prices.
cheers,
Charlie
ob,
yup, i'm actually very environmentally conscientious. my cynicism about many environmentalists (of the 'activist' variety) is that they have no idea that their actions are contradictory to their cause. For example, the idea that battery driven cars are 'green' is just plain dumb (i'm not referring to hybrids).
cheers,
charlie
ob,
for an article addressed to the lay person it's not too bad. the only thing i found particularly heinous is:
Rare earth deposits, unlike most base or precious metal deposits, normally contain multiple mineral phases – or in other words, have complex mineralogy that formed over different time periods and environmental conditions - making processing difficult and expensive.
while i agree with the author's opinion, i'm familiar with his own work some of which is also not particularly good science.
xrymd,
i can't answer your question regarding O&G companies. I'm a research guy in the business so I don't know much about operations of specific companies but even if i did it would be an ethics breach for me to comment.
sorry,
charlie
don't know much about CBM but this will give some perspective (keep in mind pricing is different now)
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1996/of96-735/figure5-7.htm#Figure7
i'm kind of curious if that 4-5 BSCF is total recoverable or per year or ....? Just saying it's per sqr mile doesnt tell you much.
BMY,
$45 in afterhours - what the hey? somebody care to clue me in?
tia,
Charlie
OT XOM US taxes
from http://www.manufacturing.net/News/Feeds/2011/04/mnet-mnet-industry-focus-facilities-and-operations-on-earnings-profits-and-taxes-exxonmobil-lays-it/ story dated yesterday
Finally, Cohen closes by refuting the political attacks against oil companies, the demands for higher taxes, and the claims that oil companies escape paying their fair share of federal taxes.
Let me state it unequivocally. Last year, our total taxes and duties to the U.S. government were $9.8 billion, which includes an income tax expense of $1.6 billion. Over the past five years, we incurred a total U.S. tax expense of almost $59 billion, which is $18 billion more than we earned in the United States during the same period.
And during the first quarter of this year, we incurred tax expenses in the United States of more than $3.1 billion on U.S. earnings of $2.6 billion.
if a producer wants to pipeline a very viscous crude, then the easiest, cheapest thing to do is to dilute it with a much lighter crude or a refined, lighter hydrocarbon. trucking or heating pipelines is more expensive and burns product. Diluting just delays the refining of the diluent.
AVEO
anyone know why the big jump today? 13+% on 10x volume
thx,
Charlie
Dew,
if you're referring to the price premium vs WTI, i suspect that it's because Bakken's API is 40+ vs WTI which is just under 40. Another possible reason is that the oil-sands folks in Canada need diluent.
those are just WAGs so i'd ask HES's IR experts anyway.
cheers
Charlie
Gas composition has not yet been determined but the gas being produced to surface is flammable.
what isn't so obvious from that article is: which oil are the cited taxes referenced to? I believe most Venezuelan oil is much heavier than WTI or Brent and sells at a substantial discount to those oils.
it's loony either way but it would be truly impressive if he's referencing the tax to a non-Venezuelan crude.
John,
i'm the wrong guy to ask for that sort of information. I should know more about it than i do but I'm not a flow guy so take that into consideration.
I don't think 200 mD is necessarily bad. The Macondo reservoir was supposedly only ~300 mD. The Eagle Ford shale is supposedly ~1 mD. Fracturing/stimulation is not limited to gas shales. If a rock contains sufficient quantity and quality of oil and the porosity is as you say, then I'd think they would create the permeability. Of course, if the pores are 80% full of water, then that might be another problem.
I would also think that temperature and pressure would have to be known in order to determine permeability (e.g. they affect viscosity which is also part of the viscosity calculation) so that sounds a bit off.
Bottom line is that you shouldn't read too much into an out of context permeability number.
regards,
Charlie
re: current fracking methods are wasteful.
yeah, a lot of unproductive shale gas wells are drilled and fracked because it's generally considered to be cheaper to do that than to use the more careful, deliberate methods that are used in oil and conventional gas exploration, field development, and well completion. The vast majority of shale gas wells are not logged at all. Consequently, a good bit of the learning process never happens and field development and well completions become a hodge-podge of hit-and-miss well placements and remedial completion practices.
The environmental crowd may actually help the larger exploration and service companies on this front. Developing shale gas reservoirs in a systematic way is expensive. Doing it in a sloppy way has proven to be effective and cheap. The big exploration and service companies can't compete on pricing as long as the sloppy approach remains the status quo. If the more deliberative approach becomes a legislative/regulatory requirement in order to avoid environmental problems, then the big boys win. One of those rare circumstances where a certain 400 B market cap company is cheering on the tree huggers.
I thought that "subsurface assets" were owned by the state in the western U.S. too.
‘le fracking’
this exemplifies why shale gas is not likely to be as big in Europe and other locales where ownership of subsurface assets belong to the state rather than individuals. Because the "owners" are politicians, any decision on whether extraction (or injection) proceeds inherently depends on 'popular support'. The corollary result of the community screwing a surface owner by literally under-mining them also exists.
Note this also applies to things like CO2 sequestration, however, in that case liability fears are likely to force folks in the US to act more like Europeans.
While Michael Bromwich bemoans a lack of the staff necessary to speed up the process, he's sending his staffers to Papua New Guinea to advise its officials on ways to develop the country's offshore drilling infrastructure.
Kadaicher can probably explain better, but i'll give a shot.
An exploratory well can become a production well. If memory is correct i believe this was the case for the Macondo well but in order to turn the exploration well into a production well BP would have brought in a different rig to re-enter the well, drill out the cement and recomplete the well. They also could have drilled production sidetracks off the initial well. Each rig requires its own drilling permit: one for exploration and another for recompletion/production. I also wouldn't be surprised if each sidetrack required a separate permit.
From what i see, there are many types of permits beyond a simple split between exploration and production drilling. For example, there are also permits for going into a production well to alter the well or infrastructure within the well, clean tubing, or inject stuff into the reservoir to stimulate production.
i'd bet that Japan does increase nuclear's relative share of electrical power production. They'll not allow themselves to be completely at the mercies of NG and coal exporting countries.
on a completely different note: all 550 pgs of the 2 volume Deepwater Horizon technical report are here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/51393879/DNV-Report-EP030842-for-BOEMRE-Volume-I
http://www.scribd.com/doc/51393957/DNV-BOP-report-Vol-2-2
i'm waiting for the animated version.
i can't comment on individual companies but i'll give a hint that it's not quantity but quality (of acreage and what's underneath) that counts. the seeking alpha article doesn't show who is where.
think this might have a temporary off-setting effect on stock price?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-18/bristol-myers-bribed-doctors-in-drug-scheme-california-commissioner-says.html
Bristol-Myers Bribed Doctors in Drug Scheme, California Commissioner Says
By Steven Church and Edvard Pettersson - Mar 18, 2011 3:56 PM ET
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMY) bribed doctors to prescribe the pharmaceutical company’s drugs, according to a whistle-blower lawsuit being pursued by the California insurance commissioner.
Commissioner Dave Jones said at a press conference today in Los Angeles that the drugmaker’s sales people in California provided physicians with trips to basketball camps and other kickbacks to boost prescriptions of its drugs, including Plavix and Pravachol. The lawsuit is the largest health-insurance fraud case pursued by a California agency, Jones said....
SLE +5%
I got my CO2 and LN2 mixed up. LN2 will stay a liquid at ambient temp and pressure whereas CO2 can only exist as a solid or gas at ambient conditions.
sad as it is i'm lmao
They had to provide power. From all the choices—windmills to reactors and everything between—knowing full-well the geoscience of their own nation, they chose reactors.
my Carnakian skills are no better than yours, however, i would be surprised if the Japanese substitute LNG for nuclear in order to meet their electrical power requirements both for natural security reasons and because their will be more competition for hydrocarbon fuels from other SE Asian countries. I think LNG is more likely to supplant oil and coal.
from http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/electricity.html
natural gas and nuclear accounting for about 51 percent of total generation and coal another 31 percent. The remaining portion is split between renewables and petroleum-based liquid fuels. Japan's reliance on nuclear power increases over the projection period, from 24 percent of total generation in 2007 to 34 percent in 2035. The natural gas share of generation declines slightly over the same period, from 28 percent to 27 percent, and coal's share declines to 23 percent, being displaced by nuclear and—to a much smaller extent—renewable energy sources.
Solar power, increasing by 27.2 percent per year from 2007 to 2035, is Japan's fastest growing source of renewable electricity, although it starts from a negligible amount in 2007. A recipient of favorable government policies, the growth in solar power outpaces wind power, which increases by 3.8 percent per year. Both solar and wind power, however, remain minor sources of electricity, each supplying less than 1 percent of total generation in 2035, as compared with hydropower's 8-percent share.
didn't anyone think that it was a bad idea to build six nuclear reactors on the coastline of one of the world's most seismographically active islands?
thanks much. that is an excellent piece. i only have 2 minor nitpicks: 1) the Chernobyl reactor's graphite core ignited and that was one of the principle problems in that case (C+O2=CO2 and there was a lot of graphite vs zero in Fukushima) and 2) the use of seawater may not be as trivial as portrayed. While most of the H2 was probably produced by radiolysis, some of it was probably produced by hydrolysis. Seawater would probably accelerate the corrosion reactions and conceivably cause plugging of vents/valves both from salt precipitation and corrosion.
As an aside: in the 1st reactor explosion you can briefly see a condensation cloud (what most people would probably call a 'shock wave') yet there is no visible flame. That's a clear indication of a hydrogen explosion. Most of the "smoke" cited by the CNN et al. crowd is not smoke but rather concrete dust and other particulate crap.
Another potentially pesky problem is that according to some diagrams i've seen of reactors similar to those at Fukushima is that the used fuel rod storage pools are immediately adjacent to the reactor. I don't think those are protected nearly as well as the reactor core and I'm wondering what bad things could happen if the explosion drained the pool or caused the rods to collapse onto each other at the bottom of the pool.
oops: edit. now see exwannabe covered that last point
Fukushima wiki article addendum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accident
the previous link has either been shortened or i mixed things up.
some diagrams & discussion of containment structure have been added.