The Deepwater Horizon explosion happened at a point in which the drilling had reached the oil reservoir, as we now see.
As the average untapped oil reservoir is to be found in ever smaller, deeper and tighter rock, service companies have come up with ever more innovations.
Supposedly this method can extract 60% of the oil in a reservoir.
They decline significantly from one year to the next because each barrel of oil taken from a reservoir reduces the pressure within the field, leaving less force available to push the next barrel of oil up the well.
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Understand that what got -- what happened in this incident, on the Deepwater Horizon, was after the drilling reached the reservoir of oil, in the process of capping that well.
The company said it had found relatively poor oil quality and a smaller reservoir size than expected at its Fulla prospect.
The well is gushing because of the pressure the oil is under in its reservoir 4, 300 metres below the sea bed.
The Barryroe field is now thought to have as much as 500 million barrels of recoverable light oil out of a total reservoir of 1 billion barrels.
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And following the intersection of the well bore with those relief wells, they will put heavy mud down there to suppress the pressure of the oil coming up from the reservoir, put a cement plug in and effectively do what I would call a bottom kill, as opposed to the top kill, which was not successful a couple of weeks ago.
The carbon dioxide, injected deep into the reservoir, basically scours the oil out of the rock and pushes it upward where it can flow into a well.
Operated by Anadarko with 30%, that well was another monster, going down more than 31, 000 feet in 5, 800 feet of water, and discovering a remarkable 1, 000 feet of oil-bearing rock with very promising reservoir properties.
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Net pay refers to the thickness of a reservoir capable of producing commercially viable oil and gas.
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In July 2011 the company drilled an exploration well on the Fulla prospect, where reservoir sands were found to be oil-bearing.
Globally, the oil industry recovers only about one-third of the oil that is known to exist in any given reservoir.
In its time Conroe was a gusher, flowing some 60, 000 barrels per day from a reservoir that started with as much as 2 billion barrels of oil stretching across 19, 000 acres.
Although the Saudi authorities do not release much evidence to support their claims of vast oil reserves, engineers from Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil firm, do give talks at conferences and publish papers about their experience of reservoir modelling and management.
As Nansen Saleri, the CEO of Quantum Reserve Impact in Houston and former head of reservoir management for Saudi Aramco, reported in his article in The Wall Street Journal, existing oil capacity exceeds current demand by between 3 million and 5 million barrels of oil a day.
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