Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
BTU
In the United States, the term BTU or Btu
(British thermal unit) is used to describe the
energy content of fuels
A BTU is defined as the amount of heat
required to raise the temperature of one
pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit
143 BTU is required to melt a pound of ice
BTU
One quadrillion BTU is:
1,000,000,000,000,000 BTU
That is a 1 followed by 15 zeros
It would take over 31 million years to
count to a quadrillion at the rate of one
number per second
But we are talking
about 100 quadrillion
Hydrocarbon Uses
A given oil field may contain a variety of
hydrocarbon compounds and these different
compounds have different uses
Oil, gas and methane can all be found together
Declining Yields
For land or offshore,
the average yield
from producing
wells in the U.S. is
declining, from a
peak of 18.6 barrels
per well per day in
1972 to 10.9 barrels
in 2000
Imported oil
More than half of the oil consumed by the U.S.
has been imported
Principle sources were Saudi Arabia, Venezuela,
Canada and Mexico
Hubbards Peak
M. King Hubbard was an oil man, who predicted
30 years ago that oil production would follow a
bell curve
Future Prospects
Many people think that as oil
prices soar, there will be
increased exploration and
discovery of new reserves
There is a finite amount of
petroleum in the ground and
we have found most of it
Two-thirds of new exploratory
wells come up dry
The days of the gushers are
over
Future Prospects
It is very expensive to
drill an exploratory oil
well on land
$2 to $20 million
dollars per well
Future Prospects
The costs for drilling offshore are substantially
higher, easily over $100 million
Deep water wells are currently too expensive
Secondary Recovery
There are many secondary recovery techniques
that allow addition oil to be extracted
When flow falls off, water can be pumped into
the reservoir rock, filling empty pore space and
buoying up more oil
Or you can pump in steam
Or explosives can be set off in the oil zone,
fracturing the rock and increasing permeability
Or carbon dioxide gas can be pumped in
Secondary Recovery
Many oil experts feel that secondary recovery
may allow an additional 40% of the known oil
reserves to be extracted
All of these secondary recovery methods add
to the cost of oil extraction