The Sky is Falling

So this is my last post in my Minecraft themed energy blog. I have really enjoyed writing this blog and I hope you have enjoyed reading it and have found it informative. I am saying farewell to all my dear readers for now although I might write more posts in my blog in the future especially regarding the current economics crude oil prices situation. I will also update my blog if there are any major changes in the energy industry that occur in the foreseeable future. I have personally learned a lot about oil and energy and hope that you have all found my blog informative too. One of the reasons I picked this topic is because I am considering doing an MSc in geology or finance and energy thus now I feel like I have something to talk about at my interview if I do apply and actually know what I am talking about which is always a bonus. J I have also realized through writing this blog that I definitely find the topic interesting and am now seriously looking at MSc courses related to the energy industry.

A quick summary of my blog. In my blog I have covered The Anthropocene and climate change; global energy consumption; Malthusian theories of consumption; global distribution of oil as well as its formation and recovery methods; peak oil phenomenon and the debate of how much crude oil we have left; possible undiscovered oil reserves of the Arctic; non-conventional oil and the implication of its recovery; renewable energy; nuclear energy and disasters and a little bit about the current oil economics global affairs. Thus I have covered a whole scope of different areas including geography, economics, geology, photography and politics.

The slogan question at the top of my blog states: “Is it the apocalypse of the Black Gold era and what are the alternative- from dusk till dawn or are we all doomed?”. I think I have a little bit more knowledge to answer this question after the creation of my blog. Although I discovered that the crude oil situation on the planet is indeed a sorrow site, which is also quite scary, there are a lot of other potential sources of energy. Although all these areas such as yet undiscovered Arctic oil, non-conventional oil, renewable and nuclear energy all require a great amount of research still to be done, I think there is still time for the research to take place and humanity shall be ready for change, the day crude oil runs out. Unlike the peak oil documentary, it is clear that crude oil will not suddenly disappear so I think we don’t really have anything to worry about right now however more research is certainly needed. With those thoughts, I shall leave you all and I wish everyone an amazing 2015!

Thank you very much for reading,

The Creeper.

Non-Conventional Oil

As mentioned preciously, with conventional oil running out fast and prices for crude oil increasing, the society is quickly trying to find new methods of obtaining energy. One of such methods is extraction of the same crude oil raw product from non-conventional oil. The difference between conventional and non-conventional oil is that crude oil is much harder to recover from non-conventional oil requiring much higher costs both financially and environmentally so the question remains as to whether it is worth it. The other method of obtaining energy is renewable and nuclear energy, which I shall discuss further on in my blog with all implications and advantages. I have already written a blog post about one of the non-conventional oil recovery methods from shale oil in detail and this is a more a more general post about other non-convectional oil that is out there and is being actively researched. Non-conventional oil includes oil from oil shale, oil sands, GTLs (gas to liquids), tight oil and biofuels. I shall also look at biofuels in more detail in my next post but I decided to do a more general post about all other types of non-conventional oils first because biofuel is in between being classed as non-conventional oil and renewable energy. My blog after non-conventional oil is going to explore renewable energy so I thought putting a post about biofuel in between non-convectional oil discussion and other biofuels was a good idea.

Oil sands are extra heavy crude oil or crude bitumen that is trapped in unconsolidated sandstone. These are still hydrocarbons thus forms of crude oil yet they are extremely dense and viscous making exrraction difficult, expensive and generally not possible using conventional oil extraction techniques. Some deposits, which are shallow enough, such as those found in Anthabasca oil sands can be extracted using conventional oil extraction techniques however most must be recovered using strip mining or the oil made to flow into wells using complex in-situ technologies. The more complex methods require more energy and water for the recovery of oil sands thus increasing costs yet again both monetary and environmentally. Furthermore the deposits may be contaminated by heavy metals such as nickel and vanadium as well as sulfur which mean separation after extraction is required increasing the costs of recovery. The deposits are found worldwide although the two most important, biggest and easiest to recover deposits are Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada and the Orinoco heavy oil belt in Venezuela. Regardless of all its disadvantages, oil sands production is projected to increase very singnificnatly in the next 20 years although Canadians warn that the production rates are very slow and insignificant on the global crude oil production scales (Miller, 2013).

Tight oil is crude oil that is contained in petroleum formations of low permeability- often shale or tight sandstone. Tight oil is not the same as oil shale which is produced synthetically from oil shale. Tight oil requires hydraulic fracturing and often uses the same horizontal well technology as that which is used in shale gas production. One of the problems with tight oil is that its formations are heterogeneous and hence they vary widely over small distances thus it is very hard to predict the amount of oil that can be recovered from one well let alone a reservoir which potentially makes investments into these projects unattractive. Furthermore the production of tight oil requires at least 15-20% natural gas in the reservoir pore space to be able to drive the oil towards the borehole out the reservoir. It is located all over the world in such countries as Russia, USA, China, Australia, Argentina, Libya, Venezuela, Mexico, Pakistan, Canada and Indonesia thus could present a solution for each country’s own recovery of this product when conventional oil is exhausted. Some studies and news forums suggest that a $150 billion investment is going to be made into the tight oil industry in North America in 2015 (Mills, 2008).

GTLs and as well as CTLs (coal-to-liquid) are already being produced in small volumes as very expensive substitutes to conventional crude oil. They are expected to increase the contribution to the global energy font in the future. The four main conversion technologies used for the production of unconventional oil this way are Fischer-Tropsch process, Mobil Process, Belgius process and Karrick process. However natural gas requires high transportation costs thus many known yet remote fields are not yet being developed but the on-site conversion to liquid fuels are making energy recovered this way available under current economic conditions and large plants for coal to liquid conversions are currently being built in China. There are also some plants where gas-to-liquid conversion occurs found in such countries as Malaysia, South Africa and Qatar. Although the processes are highly inefficient in both scenarios and very large quantities of coal and gas are required to provide significant contributions to tatal liquid supply. Also environmental concerns remain a worry as the conversions generate high amounts of CO2, which is then released into the atmosphere. CO2 is a GHG and hence its emissions have significant impacts on global warming.

Thus overall it seems clear that so far no technology is available to make recovery of oil and energy from non-conventional oil nor economically profitable nor environmentally friendly. No significant research has been performed yet as it would require a lot of investment so it is unlikely that these methods will take of on global scales any time in the foreseeable future until humanity gets desperate to obtain more oil and thus non-conventional oil can not currently be considered as a viable alternative to the conventional oil and energy we obtain from it.

Deathly Hollows

Before I move onto non-conventional oil and renewable energy, I just thought I’d a little blog post of the “documentary” I have watched about peak oil the other day. This program was filmed by National Geographic and it explores what would happen to our world if all of the oil run out immediately and before we adapted to other ways of obtaining energy. Although it is classed as a documentary, it is more of a fictional horror film of how society would not manage without oil. Most of it is obvious anyway but it is a good little horror film of the potential oil apocalypses and the deathly hollows of the absence of oil for our civilization today. I think it should be taken with a pinch of salt however it does portray well how important oil is in our every day life today which we might not even always realize.

Oil Formation

This is just a just post about oil formation itself. Thank god for my A-level Chemistry knowledge here. Petroleum is made up of naturally occurring hydrocarbons in rocks originating from the decay of organic materials. Over millions of years thus geological time scales the temperature and pressure rises and organic maturation begins. During this processes fossils are converted into insoluble mixture of extremely large organic hydrocarbons known as kerogen and as the process continues, hydrogen rich molecules break off forming a liquid (Miller, 2013). The generation of oil as we know it, as a liquid starts at around 70C and continues until 120-160C. This temperature interval during which oil formation occurs is know as the oil window. Higher temperatures cause further decay of hydrocarbons into C1-C5 hydrocarbons known as methane to pentane. The rate of oil formation is very slow at only a few million barrels per year- much slower than the rate of extraction of oil for human consumption hence it is not surprising that we are running out of oil which is at 30 billion barrels annually. (Miller, 2013). Figure 1 below shows a crude oil fractioning column which shows the size of different hydrocarbon molecules and what type of oil they are.

Figure 1.

Source: BBC, 2014. Crude oil fractioning column.

Conventional oil includes crude oil, condensate and NGLs. It is the oil that is currently extracted and used for everyday human consumption. However non-conventional oil also exists and this includes tight oil, extra-heavy oil, oil sands and kerogen oil. Tight oil is similar chemical composition to crude oil thus some literally classifies it as conventional rather than non-conventional oil. Non-conventional oil has the potential to be converted into crude oil and other conventional oils for human use and research is currently being done in this sphere. At the moment those, it is economically unprofitable and requires unsustainable processes thus conversions are not widely performed other than for research processes. However with oil running out, the price of oil will increase and perhaps conversion of non-conventional oil will be the global solution to oil thirst rather than the use of renewable energy. I will discuss non-conventional oil further on in this blog.

Should the Scots Fear- Is the North Sea Oil Running Out?

So today’s question is whether the North Sea oil is running out. Whilst it is obvious that at some point, it will, in fact run out- it is yet a much harder question as to when exactly this will occur. Some sources such as The Economist argue that Britain’s offshore oil fields have already been producing oil for much longer than expected and thus it is no surprise that primary and secondary recovery oil is now reaching the end thus requires investment as well as all the current infrastructure is sucking money out of the UK economy due to its old age and the need to upgrade to new technologies. (Economist, 2014).

Whilst other sources argue that we have nothing to fear. According to different organizations, we have a very different amount of oil still left. Oil and Gas UK give a figure of 15 to 24 billion barrels boe thus claiming the energy will still be going beyond 2050 whilst the UK government claims that we are between 11.1 billion to 21 billion boe and The Wood Review reports between 12 to 24 billion boe of extractable oil. These are very different estimates and this is mainly due to the fact that as states in previous blog posts, it is very difficult to estimate the exact amounts of oil that is still left in a reserve thus there is a lot of uncertainty. Furthermore the UK may not want to make the actual figures public and may be keeping some oil as the nation’s reserve that is left for emergencies and security.

Having just faced The Scottish Independence, the UK remains shaken up about its oil. In the light of Scottish Independence, the amount of oil in reserves was exaggerated as obviously the arrogant Scots, wanting to become independent, closed their eyes and did not want to admit that the oil is running out. Leaving out all the other economical and political reasons as to why Scotland becoming independent would have been the worst idea ever, it is worth mentioning that all the monetary investments into the oil rigs (and can I highlight that the investments will have to increase by a great amount in the future to many enhanced oil recovery possible) were all supplied by the taxes that came from the UK tax payer- mainly made up of the population of people in England. Regardless of politics, it is hard to say how much oil is actually left in the North Sea and politics don’t help the matter making any conclusions on the subject more difficult however even the European Commissions Report on some EORs seems to mention the North Sea and that it will shortly run out of oil altogether although EORs are first to be used thus giving us a hint that the reservoirs have 5-15% more of extractable oil left within them. It does tell us that the area has been explored really carefully to find any possible oil reserves and there have been very few significant exploration successes and oil fields found since 1990.

While the first commercial extraction of oil on the shores of the North Sea was in 1851 when James Young retorted oil from oil shale mined in Midland Valley of Scotland, the first well was actually dug in 1964 in by the UK when the major exploration really begun. Regardless of how much oil remains in the North Sea, I think it is important to realize that it sure will run out before long making the UK economy struggle and alternative ways of obtaining energy should be explored. Below, is a video made by angry Scots, who in fact don’t believe that the oil will run out at all and think that there is some conspiracy against them and to try to convince people to vote “No” against the Scottish Independence. Perhaps people should be made more aware about the reality of oil running out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v56WJQrG9Q