[Rhodes22-list] Opinion on the Pickens Plan - non sailing, non political, educational

[Mike Cheung]

Nah, my work is unrelated to EOR though the basic science overlaps
considerably; which is why I knew so many folks in the EOR community in the
early 80's.  There was a huge effort going on that basically had the plug
pulled as oil prices dropped to about $15/barrel in the mid 80's and looked
like they would stay there awhile ... which they did.  My better half worked
for BP at that time in refining technology development and their main focus
was finding cost savings so the corporation could survive on $15/barrel oil. 
Part of that survival from a corporate standpoint at BP and most of the
other major oil companies was to pretty much get out of the enhanced oil
recovery research business.

The rest of the crowd may wonder why EOR is potentially such a big deal. 
When an oil field is "done" using conventional oil recovery there is still
somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% to 70% of the oil still left in the
ground.  By using various techniques, anywhere from half of that oil to
nearly all of it can be recovered, but it is: (a) not easy and (b) not
cheap.  The magic number back in the 80's was $50/barrel oil; at that price
many of the advanced techniques became economically viable.  Obviously the
magic number is now higher since 20 to 30 years have passed.  

My earlier point, admittedly bordering on a rant, was that good research,
especially on fairly hard problems, takes time and a community of
researchers working on it.  What we did with EOR in particular and energy in
general was go from 100+% effort in the mid 70's to early 80's to very
nearly zero effort from the early 80's to today when suddenly it's 100+%
effort again because gasoline broke $4/gallon.  Naturally the community of
energy researchers from the earlier 100+% effort period are now retired,
dead, or long ago moved on to other work that they could find support for.  

What we need, I hate to say, is a sustained period of sufficiently expensive
energy so that we can sustain serious energy research for a long time.  Then
there is hope for real progress.  It would admittedly be better if "cheap"
oil returned, but we nonetheless made a long term commitment to energy
research (EOR, solar, nuclear, bio ...).  However, business economics (i.e.
next quarters profits and share price), politics (what's the crisis du
jour?), and human nature (if it's cheap now why worry about tomorrow?) make
it unlikely that would happen.  So the pain is unfortunately necessary and
I, for one, hope fervently that it continues at a high enough level to keep
us focussed, but a low enough level that it doesn't kill us.

Mike C.



Brad Haslett-2 wrote:
> 
> Mike,
> 
> Since you were/are kinda/sorta in the neighborhood, were any of your EOR
> projects in the Illinois Basin Field, specifically the Salem-Louden
> anticline?  I grew up at the edge of that field and have watched it go
> through several price and research cycles (it was a former Exxon research
> project for water flood).  The dumbest investment move I ever made was
> walking away from a lease in late 2003 because the seller and I couldn't
> negotiate the last $6000.  He still owns the lease and must be having a
> good
> laugh at my expense every month the check arrives!
> 
> You are 100% correct on the political angle, that's how we got corn based
> ethanol.  Whether we open E&D for shale oil or coal for a Fischer-Tropsch
> conversion process (including the 1.7 million acres of high-yield coal in
> Utah taken off the market), we'll need energy to produce energy, ie,
> nukes.
> 
> Four dollars a gallon gasoline seems to be the psychological and economic
> tipping point for US citizens - or perhaps a world conflict that makes
> transportation fuel unavailable at any price.  Let's hope it doesn't go
> that
> far.
> 
> Brad
> 
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Mike Cheung <mikecheung at att.net> wrote:
> 
>>
>> Let us not make the same mistake(s) again ....
>>
>> The last "oil crisis" kicked off a huge surge of effort to conserve
>> energy,
>> find "alternative" energy sources, and recover more oil from the ground.
>> Naturally it also spurred a huge effort to find more oil.  The latter won
>> out and the former were starved for funding.
>>
>> While the situation is not identical, the rise of the Asian economies is
>> one
>> huge difference, it is similar enough to cause concern.  As a engineering
>> graduate student in a field related to oil recovery at that time, I met
>> many
>> of the researchers working on enhanced oil recovery; most of them are
>> long
>> gone.  The funding dried up and either they moved on or no one took up
>> their
>> work as they passed.  In fact only one of the "old gang" of EOR
>> researchers
>> is still plugging away and he's now approaching or into his eighties.
>>
>> So, what do we do?  If we say, let the market decide ... well, if a
>> couple
>> of decent oil reservoirs are found oil will drop to "reasonable" levels,
>> say
>> $100/barrel, and we'll be "happy".  If we say, let the government solve
>> this, then there will be enormous sums spend on bad ideas in politically
>> correct districts.
>>
>> So what do we do?  From the political standpoint, damned if I know; from
>> the
>> technical standpoint my gut says: design a nuclear power plant that can
>> operate on top of the San Andreas fault and built thousands of them ...
>> this
>> is a variation on the French approach, push hard on "darn near anything"
>> to
>> liquid transportation fuels (probably via Fischer-Tropsch chemistry)
>> since
>> we're pretty much addicted to "pumpable" transportation fuels, find some
>> way
>> to reward efforts in wind and solar.  But remember gang, we're fighting a
>> tough battle between fossil fuels and "renewable" fuels.  The fossil
>> fuels
>> have a huge advantage, they're the result of the solar energy the earth
>> received stored up over millions of years, beating them with just this
>> years
>> solar energy is not easy, maybe not even possible.
>>
>> Mike C. s/v Muireann and a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular
>> Engineering, The University of Akron, Akron, OH
>> --
>> View this message in context:
>> http://www.nabble.com/Opinion-on-the-Pickens-Plan---non-sailing%2C-non-political%2C-educational-tp18964601p18975299.html
>> Sent from the Rhodes 22 mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>
>> __________________________________________________
>> To subscribe/unsubscribe or for help with using the mailing list go to
>> http://www.rhodes22.org/list
>> __________________________________________________
>>
> __________________________________________________
> To subscribe/unsubscribe or for help with using the mailing list go to
> http://www.rhodes22.org/list
> __________________________________________________
> 
> 

-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Opinion-on-the-Pickens-Plan---non-sailing%2C-non-political%2C-educational-tp18964601p18982608.html
Sent from the Rhodes 22 mailing list archive at Nabble.com.