As a continuation to last week's article titled "Oil industry’s R&D deactivates 'peak'", and as reported by the 2013 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, the world has increased its global oil reserves by 15 billion barrels in 2012 reaching a total of 1,669 billion barrels by end of 2012. These additional global reserves amounted to 647 billion bbls between 2002 and 2012, the highest in the last few decade, was achieved despite the exponential cumulative global consumption of more than 300 billion bbls during the same period. It is worth mentioning here that 50% of today’s global reserves are located in the Middle East region and more than 72% with OPEC countries.
The 26% over the 2002 figure can be directly correlated to the exponential Research & Development (R&D) investment that has been spent by the oil industry in the last decade. Although the literature lacks specific quantitative reports and studies that precisely quantify the total R&D investment by international, national and service oil & gas companies, some unofficial reports indicated significant increase of such investment in the last 10 years. For example, a report titled “The 2010 R&D Scorecards” indicated that the global oil & gas industry had invested more than 6 billion English pound in 2010. Another unofficial report titled “The 2012 EU Industrial R&D Scoreboards” showed that the oil and gas industry had invested more than $11 billion in 2011. These unofficial reports indicate a trend for an increase in the amount of money spent by the oil industry mainly to develop new advanced technologies to help the industry add more reserves through finding new difficult discoveries and achieving higher recoveries. Such R&D increase is expected to continue to address more challenges objectives and difficult reserves finding and production scenarios.
As a result of such high R&D investment, several advanced technologies were developed in the last 10 years that helped the oil industry to address the oil supply challenge by increasing the reserves and recovery such as:
• High resolution seismic and advanced seismic interpretation that helped the industry to discover difficult deep offshore fields under harsh environment.
• Long-reach drilling that helped the industry to reach deep reservoirs and drill multilateral wells that maximized reservoir contact and, hence, recovery.
• Drilling geo-steering that helped the industry to develop and produce very thin reservoirs called stringers that could not be developed using previous technologies.
• Advanced smart completion that helped in maximizing the production and increasing recovery.
• Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) that increase recovery from heavy, matured and near-matured oil fields.
• Intelligent and digital fields that helped the industry to maximize production and reduce cost.
• Hydraulic fracturing that helped the industry to develop unconventional oil and gas resources such as tight and shale oil and gas reservoirs.
• Advances in Sand oil development especially in Canada, the country that has the potential to be the third-largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela with sand oil.
• Advances in reservoir modeling and supercomputing that helped the industry to model and better forecast the oil and gas fields that would maximize the recovery, etc.
In summary, the oil industry has indeed succeeded in deactivating the Peak Oil Theory and increased is proved oil reserves to a level that is sufficient to meet almost 53 years of the future global consumption through more R&D spending. However, the unconventional resources hydrocarbon complexity and global oil demand challenges are increasing with time, having in mind the population and economic growth which will drive the global energy demand and consumption. Hence, the oil industry needs to continue increasing its R&D investment further to discover and recover more challenging and difficult reach oil and gas resources.
— Dr. Sami Alnuaim is a Saudi writer. He can be reached at www.saudienergy.net and followed on Twitter@neaimsa
