Domestic Oil: 5 years from exploration to production
By Josh Painter Posted in Energy — Comments (13) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
How often have you heard Democrat politicians and liberal environmentalists argue that it makes no sense to drill for oil domestically because it will take at least ten years before we will see any of that oil?
Let's put that old canard permanently to rest, shall we? According to a report from APRN, Alaska's Public Radio Network, it's been done in just half that time:
Pioneer Natural Resources Company has brought a near-shore oil production unit on line. Pioneer spokesman Tadd Owens says the first barrel from the Oooguruk facility was sold yesterday. The unit lies northwest of the Kuparuk river, inside the barrier islands of the Beaufort sea. Owens says Pioneer is the first independent to bring new operations on line and they did it quickly — from exploration to production took only 5 years. He says the plan is for 40 wells to be on line within 3 years.
So why do they insist that it would take ten years before we see any oil from new domestic drilling? Since I'm at a loss to understand the liberal thought process, I can only guess.
One, it's a nice, round number which would tend to discourage those, now a majority, who want to see the U.S. domestic oil industry revived. "Ten years, wow, that's like a whole decade, dude!"
Two, perhaps wanting to inject a grain of truth into the big lie, they grabbed the number from the history of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a nearly 800-mile project which was almost ten years in the making, from the 1968 confirmation of a major oil find in Prudhoe Bay to 1977, when a tanker sailed out of Valdez carrying the first load of North Slope crude.
We could speculate on their research (or lack of it) and motivation for not being fully forthright about the length of time required to bring in an oil field, but that's not the point. The point is that a field in Alaska was made to produce in just five years from when it was explored. Given the harsh Alaskan climate, one is led to wonder how long it would take to bring fields in the much less demanding conditions of the lower 48 into production.
Consider that the the Elm Coulee oil field in Montana, part of the Bakken Formation, was only discovered in 2000, yet it had produced 32 million barrels of oil just six years later and has produced about 65 million barrels to date. That was done using horizontal drilling tecniques and other new technologies to meet the unique challenges of the formation.
Five years. That's not a long time to have to wait to bring in an oil field. It's just a year longer than a single presidential term and a year less than a senator's term. Hmmmm...
Drill here. Drill now. Pay less. One by one, the Democrats' weak arguments against domestic drilling are being shot down and exposed for the bunk that they are. We shouldn't even be having this discussion. We should be getting about the business of reviving the American domestic petroleum industry. Wouldn't you just love to see an APEC, consisting of the United States, Canada and Mexico, organized to give OPEC some competition?
- JP
Hat Tip: Maggie Thornton
the Prudhoe Bay field were brought to production in less than five years of actual construction. The rest of that decade was spent in environmental and Native claims litigation and re-design as the result of environmental litigation.
In Vino Veritas
And when the environmental lobby says it will take ten years, they may very well be in a position to ensure this (with litigation). However, if the people finally turns the cornor on the drilling idea, we can and should streamline the environmental requirements at the same time.
KC, still living free, or trying to.
Actually I'm stealing the analogy from a RedState poster from a few days ago, but it's a good one.
The time it takes to develop an oil field depends on geography and infrastructure. The more remote it is, the larger it is, and the more hostile the conditions, the longer it will take.
In the case of Elm Coulee Field, I would guess that most of it is on private lands, so it could be developed with minimal government interference. And it could be developed incrementally, with several operators drilling concurrently, each one only worried about financing and equipping his wells.
On public lands (ANWR or the OCS), you have a minimum of three years of lease sale planning, environmental impact studies and permitting before private industry is turned loose to do their thing. That's when your five years begins, so to start with a blank slate can be 8-10 years.
Does it have to be that way? We could change it if we had the national will, but it seems like one side of the aisle is not serious about developing new supplies and likes things pretty much the way they are now.
"PsychObama, qu'est-ce que c'est?"
Even people who don't have a background in forestry (as I do) are quick to realize it's a long-term investment, one you might reckon in human generations rather than years, but people in the business are keen to estimate, as best anyone can, known supply in the commodity for the mid- and the long terms, and the timber market experiences wild volatility much as oil does (for example, a hurricane could unexpectedly flood the market with massive amounts of salvaged wood).
While the oil industry might not seem as obviously vested in good conservation practices as timber, it's on their minds, too.
a 4,500 foot well near Wild Horse, Colorado. I don't know how long it took the casing crew (gasp! Halliburton) to do their thing after that, but it's a bunch of nonsense that they take so long to complete.
Tim Schieferecke
These would be American jobs, paid for by American companies, not the Fed Government (hey, maybe that's why the libs are against drilling.) And in case we need more petroleum engineers than we have in the USA, many freedom-loving Venezuelan oil people have had to escape Chavez' control over the past year or two.
-- A true evolutionist would let endangered species die off. Anyone care to change sides?
-- Can't Feed 'em? Don't Breed 'em! --
The demos keep pushing for OPEC to expand their production, so they want Americans to send more money to the Saudis for Saudi jobs and Saudi companies. We should be drilling here and producing American jobs with American companies.
that a lot of those jobs would be union jobs. The Dems should be rejoicing.
One thing about the present scenario...its giving a lot of people another chance to open their eyes. Of course, were I (for example) a UMW coal miner who had lost his job because of the EPA, I wouldn't need another chance.
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Drill...Drill...Drill!!!
between the old-line trades and crafts unions who do real work and the big wall to wall public employee and service employee unions that now dominate the AFL-CIO and Democrat labor policy. Actually, if Republicans could get past the "outlaw all unions" mentality, the trade union voter is the vestigial "Reagan Democrat" and is a fertile ground for Republicans.
In Vino Veritas
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/The_Real_ANWR_Story_in_Pictures.pdf
Some good facts on ANWR. There should be ads on TV with this information all over America.
One reasons people should be voting for McCain, his plan to end the moritorium on offshore drilling. I wish he would change his mind about ANWR now. Obama's plan, tax the oil companies, punish them for allowing the price of gas to go up -- typical liberal nonsense.
What is the story with Lindsey Willims, who says there is hundreds of times more oil in Alaska than the USGS says. He sounds like a nut. How can he know that if he hasn't done any test wells or seismic studies?
I think some people are just cashing in on the public anxiety about energy. Whether it is Williams, telling us "Don't worry, everything will be great" or Kunstler describing total disaster ("The Long Emergancy"), the game seems to be to make a fortune selling books and lectures.
is in Alaska; very little of it has been explored and only a miniscule portion of what has been explored was explored using modern technology. For example, Naval Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, west of Prudhoe Bay, was identified as an oil province and set aside in 1923 but there has been little exploration and even less actual drilling since then because the US wouldn't allow it.
The first oil province in Alaska was centered on Katalla on the Gulf of Alaska coast. It was in production in the early 20th Century and even had a small refinery. Katalla was bypassed as the point to push a railroad into the interior and the oil property and eventually even the town was just abandoned. It is all in the Wrangell-St.Elias National Park now, and it is hard to get a permit to even walk in there so you can forget about oil drilling.
As I explained in my piece on ANWR and the Alaska OCS a couple of weeks ago, after ANILCA, the US designated all of its land on the Alaska landmass, about a third of the landmass, as parks, refuges, reserves, national forests, and wilderness areas. The parks and wilderness areas are virtually untouchable by anything other than hiking boots and kayaks. the national forests have been essentially turned into parks since, thanks to WJC, there is no longer a timber industry in Alaska. The reserves and refuges are simply an administrative fiction under ANILCA; they have no more or less wildlife than any other place in Alaska and they have no special scenic or historic value.
In Vino Veritas
get in the way and crash Nancy and Harry's party, now would we?
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4.62, 0.51