Making The Transition To Unconventional Oils.Unconventional oils could play a very important part beyond 2010, on account of the extent of the resources concerned, of the oil production complement they could provide, and of the geopolitical ge·o·pol·i·tics n. (used with a sing. verb) 1. The study of the relationship among politics and geography, demography, and economics, especially with respect to the foreign policy of a nation. 2. a. counterbalance they increasingly represent in relation to the inevitable concentration of the conventional petroleum resources in the Middle East. Unconventional oils cover extra heavy oils, tar sands Tar sands is a common name of what are more properly called bituminous sands, but also commonly referred to as oil sands or (in Venezuela) extra-heavy oil. They are a mixture of sand or clay, water, and extremely heavy crude oil. and oil shales oil shale Any fine-grained sedimentary rock that contains solid organic matter (kerogen) and yields significant quantities of oil when heated. This shale oil is a potentially valuable fossil fuel, but the present methods of mining and refining it are expensive, damage the . Although poorly identified, it is known that the resources in place are gigantic, of the order of several hundred billion tons; however, their recovery ratio will certainly remain quite low: 7 to 8% today, maybe 25% by 2020. The petroleum industry is particularly interested in the extra heavy oils of the Orinoco Belt The Orinoco Belt is a territory which occupies the southern strip of the eastern Orinoco River Basin in Venezuela. Its local Spanish name is Faja Petrolífera del Orinoco (Orinoco Petroleum Belt). in Venezuela, which have a gravity of 7 to 12? API (Application Programming Interface) A language and message format used by an application program to communicate with the operating system or some other control program such as a database management system (DBMS) or communications protocol. , with resources in place of 190 bn tons, more than 40 of which are already considered as technically exploitable. Tar sands also are very promising. Until now, the interest was mainly focused on the immense resources in Canada: 300 Gt, 10% of which are considered to be "economically exploitable". Two sites are currently developed in Canada, both based on "mining" techniques: SUNCOR and SYNCRUDE, which produce 280,000 b/d of synthetic crude. Their production costs have been progressively brought down below 12 $/bl, but the investments required for this type of plant are very high ; besides, future advances in mining appear to be limited and this technique can only concern shallow resources (60 to 80 m), which are quite limited. On the other hand, the petroleum techniques available today (horizontal or greatly deflected de·flect intr. & tr.v. de·flect·ed, de·flect·ing, de·flects To turn aside or cause to turn aside; bend or deviate. [Latin d well drilling Well drilling is the process of drilling a hole in the ground for the extraction of a natural resource such as ground water, natural gas, or petroleum. Drilling for the exploration of the nature of the material underground (for instance in search of metallic ore) is best described , optimum steam-injection drive, combination of these techniques,...) could be applied, in the near future, to tar sands and lead to a spectacular productivity increase of the wells, thus allowing access to much more considerable resources and a 30% reduction, or even more, in the production costs. |
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