Oil Production

There are three different stages of oil recovery from a field. Primary, secondary and tertiary recovery.

Primary recovery: Produces oil using the natural pressure in the ground as a force to push the oil to the surface.

Secondary recovery: The pressure in the ground will eventually fall and it will become necessary(if economical) to use secondary recovery methods to recover the oil. Methods like pumps and injection of gases and liquids to raise the pressure.

Tertiary recovery: In this third step more advanced and sophisticated methods are used. Methods that are reducing the viscosity of the oil. This step is also known as enchanced recovery.

Oil is often divided into conventional and unconventional oil. Conventional oil is defined as oil that's produced by the primary and secondary recovery methods. 95% of the worlds oil production comes from conventional oil. Unconventional methods often are expensive and with todays oil price it's not economically acceptable to use these methods in a larger scale. I will give a deeper explanation of this subject later.

Conventional crude oil reserves includes all oil that is possible to extract from a well using the primary, secondary and tertiary methods. This does not include the unconventional methods. The oil reserves are classified as proven, probable or possible depending on the probability of finding a certain amount of oil in the field.

Proven P90, 90% of finding a certain amount of oil in the field.
Probable P50 50% of finding a certain amount of oil in the field.
Possible P10 10% of finding a certain amount of oil in the field.

A Crude Awakening

A good and graspable documentary about the dependency of oil: A Crude Awakening. The trailer follows.

A short introduction

Peak Oil means that the global production of oil is reaching its maximum. In this case production means the extraction and refining of oil and the peak is that it will only go downhill from thereon. Oil has been around for millions and millions of years and is what we call a non-renewable resource, in other words, when the oil is gone it's gone.

Combine the fact that the production(supply) is declining with a growing population and the industrial urge from the developing countries and we can draw the conclusion that we are running out of oil.

So what will a shortage of oil mean?

Today we are more dependent on oil than we like to believe. Almost everything that we use in our modern society can be traced back to oil. From the transportation and packaging of our food to plastics in our computers and cars. If the oil get more expensive, everything that is based on oil get more expensive. If we run out of oil, naturally we will also run out of everything that's made of oil.
Oil is a scarce resource and this fact is easily seen in world politics as well, Venezuela is securing their oil by throwing out foreign oil-companies. USA are waging war in Iraq.
Much of what's going on in the world today is about oil.

Foreword

This blog is about peak oil, a delicate matter that we are forced to deal with in a very near future. My idea with this blog is to present articles, videos and reviews of books about the subject along with my own comments. As the days pass I will also explain important oil related terms and theories as well as my own ideas.