36 // COMPANY DRIVER // AUGUST 2013
BUSTED! Myths, Hoaxes & Conventional Un-Wisdom
of years, gathering oil from surface seeps for medicinal and other purposes.
After centuries of gathering oil from the surface, Drake’ s well went to the whopping depth of 69.5 feet. The current record for drilling depth stands at just over 40,000 feet. For sake of comparison, if Drake’ s well was the equivalent of backing a typical semi up to a dock, modern wells are the equivalent of backing up a more than 7.5-mile long trailer.
Prior to the 1970s, oil wells were drilled vertically, though with some deflection due to flexing of the drill string as depths increased. If a driller guessed the wrong spot, or the drill string drifted off in the wrong direction, the well could be drawing from a restricted portion of an oil reservoir, or worse yet, come up dry just off the edge of an oil pocket.
More recent developments allow the drill head to be steered with a high degree of accuracy, starting out vertically and eventually transitioning to a fully horizontal path. This not only allows a driller to hit his target accurately, it also allows drilling wells out to several points in an oil reservoir from a single production platform location.
In addition to increasing well depths and steerable drill heads, other technologies including“ fracking” and steam extraction have allowed more oil to be recovered from depths and locations that would have been impractical and unreachable just a few decades earlier.
Another obvious hole in the peak oil theory is the economics of oil recovery. When the barrel price of oil was $ 20 or less in thencurrent dollars, there was a pretty low limit to how much could be spent recovering oil. With today’ s prices hovering consistently around $ 100 per barrel, oil that wasn’ t economical to recover at $ 20 or even $ 60 per barrel is suddenly easy to reach.
The threats of reaching Hubbert’ s peak oil have always assumed that no new reserves would be found. The trouble is, just about anywhere a test well has been drilled over the past few decades, economically recoverable oil has been found. From Alaska’ s North Slope, to the Bakken Formation in Montana, to the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, to more recent shale finds in the Northeast, each new find is rated at some multiple of the oncereigning Mideast oil reserves.
While similar new finds have been reported around the globe, it’ s important to remember that only a small portion of the planet has ever been explored for potential oil reserves, and an even smaller portion has been explored using the latest technology.
With a minority of the planet having been explored, and just 150 years of extraction weighed against millions of years of geological activity, perhaps the biggest problem with the peak oil theory is scale. If oil is in fact a finite commodity, and we’ ve literally only begun to scratch the surface, peak oil is more likely to be millennia away, rather than just a decade or two.
On the other hand, what if oil isn’ t a finite commodity? When early oil finds were made at or near the surface, it was plausible to think that oil was only derived from organic sources.
But with modern oil recovery taking place tens of thousands of feet below the surface and thousands of miles away from continental and plate boundaries, could it be possible that oil is a byproduct of the same deep earth processes that produce lava? Research in Russia has examined this possibility, and at least one oil reservoir in the Gulf of Mexico appeared to“ refill” after being pumped down.
We didn’ t evolve out of the stone age for lack of stones, and it’ s unlikely that when we evolve beyond the oil age, that it will be because we ran out of oil. CD
36 // COMPANY DRIVER // AUGUST 2013
CD 0813 Text. indd 36 7 / 8 / 13 10:54 AM