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Oil & Gas Journal

Bob Tippee
Editor

The leader of an international petroleum-industry research group believes technology will raise the amount of oil ultimately produced to three or four times currently estimated levels of reserves.

Olivier Appert, chairman and chief executive officer of Institut Français du Pétrole, Rueil-Malmaison, France, expects growth in conventional reserves to come from a combination of increased rates of recovery from reserves now on production, from discoveries and extensions, and from improved recovery from the deposits yet to be found.

Recovery improvements from nonconventional resources, such as extra-heavy oils and tar sands, will yield further supply.

IFP, which operates as both a research center and industrial group, treats the natural limits of fossil-energy resources as one of two key, long-term challenges for the industry. The other challenge is climate change.

Future supply
Future discoveries and extensions of known fields, Appert estimates, will add more than 100 billion tonnes to oil reserves, currently estimated at 145 billion tonnes.
"The main difference is that future discoveries will be smaller than past ones and more difficult to find," he says.

Advances in enhanced-recovery techniques can boost the average recovery factor for conventional deposits from 35% at present to 50% by about 2020, he believes. The improvement will raise conventional reserves by 110 billion tonnes in existing fields and by 40 billion tonnes in fields yet to be discovered.

Technology also can increase the recovery factor for nonconventional heavy oils, now 8-10%. IFP estimates volumes of extra-heavy oils and tar sands in place at 685 billion tonnes of oil equivalent.
"We may consider that potential recoverable reserves of Alberta in Canada and the Orinoco belt in Venezuela may be the equivalent to present Middle East reserves," Appert says. "That's why we consider that technology may push the limits of oil reserves and improve the available reserves of petroleum product by a factor of three or four."

Appert notes that the two energy-market sectors most closely linked with economic growth—energy for electricity generation and oil for transportation—have the most rapid demand growth and highest emissions of greenhouse gases.
And their inherent challenges differ. For electricity, the main hurdle is investment; for oil in transportation, it's the natural limit of supply.
Although hydrogen holds promise, the IFP chief says, it won't be widely available for transportation "for decades."

That's why it's important to extend reserves. An IFP strategy asserts that the "first substitute [for] conventional oil is technological oil."
Among recent examples of work in the technology of oil drilling and production, IFP has:
-- Entered into a partnership with Schlumberger Ltd. to market software that manages uncertainty in production forecasts.
-- Developed technologies for seismic monitoring in cooperation with Gaz de France, Cie. Générale de Géophysique (CGG), and Magnitude.
-- Developed and tested hybrid peripheral lines made of specialty materials to lower the mass of risers on offshore drilling units.