HOUSTON — Imagine having a nice, ripe orange ready for squeezing, but you’re getting only a small amount of juice.
There has to be more, but you just can’t get at it.
That’s the frustration of the global oil business.
The industry is spending billions on technology to increase the amount of oil it can extract from the ground. Oil companies typically recover only about one in three barrels of oil from their fields, but they can’t afford to leave so much crude untapped at a time when it’s difficult to access new reserves.
One of the latest attempts to learn where the oil is hiding involves injecting hundreds of millions of tiny carbon clusters deep into natural underground reservoirs, where changes to their chemical makeup would signal whether they’ve come across oil, water or other substances.
The clusters, referred to as “nano reporters” and roughly 30,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, also can tell the temperature, pressure and other factors that help a company zero in on more oil.
The industry is also upgrading the ways it plies more oil out of the earth, techniques that involve heat and chemical injections or gas and water pressure.
If oil companies could recover 50 percent of the crude in their fields instead of 35 percent, it would double the world’s proven reserves of about 1.2 trillion barrels, the International Energy Agency says.
Though it could take a couple of decades to reach 50 percent, even a modest increase in the amount of oil recovered will alter the debate about peak oil — the point at which half the world’s reserves have been depleted.
The debate pits those who say there’s enough oil to last 100 years or more against those who see a looming scramble for a shrinking supply. The latter group foresees supply shortages and price spikes that could cripple the global economy.
Nansen Saleri, the former head of reservoir management for Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, said improving worldwide recovery rates by 10 to 15 percentage points could provide an additional 50-year supply of oil at current consumption rates.
“I’d say 15 to 20 percent (recovery) is doable, especially if you assume we’re going to be in a robust price environment,” said Saleri, whose Houston-based consulting business, Quantum Reservoir Impact, helps producers improve recoveries.
The key is obtaining detailed information about what’s going on thousands of feet below the earth’s surface. That knowledge can improve the chances of drilling accurately and cut costs. The industry has made significant advances in seismic testing and other imaging and sensing technology, but reservoirs remain, in many ways, deep, dark mysteries.
