Popular misconceptions about oil are overwhelming. Some of them are rather funny: for example, we call it "black gold", although this is often not the case at all, it can be of different colors. For example, oil, which contains few metals and sulfur, is almost transparent, and some fields produce greenish or yellowish raw materials, there is even a reddish variety.
One can argue for a long time what oil is in the history of mankind - a great blessing or a curse. There is definitely no definite answer to this question, and we will not start this discussion. Today we will talk about the most popular stereotypes about oil and try to figure out why in reality everything is different than many people used to think.
This article can be listened to as a podcast.
Stereotype No. 1. Oil will soon become unnecessary?
For the last 20 years, one has only heard that oil and petroleum products will "very soon" be superseded by new energy sources - from "green" electricity and biomass to hydrogen. Are these predictions coming true?
So far, the consumption of oil as a fuel is growing all the time. Except, of course, 2020, when people practically stopped traveling. But we still hope that this situation is temporary.
In the 1980s, the volume of oil consumption was 60 million barrels per day, in 2004 - 70 million, and in 2019 - more than 80 million. This is especially interesting against the backdrop of promises made by the Club of Rome and a number of other organizations back in the 1970s that oil will run out "in 20-30 years." Since then, half a century has passed, and all this time, production has continued to grow. So far, no one can say with certainty when it will peak.
If we take the volume of primary energy consumed in the world, then oil, oddly enough, has been in the first place all this time. Primary energy is called that that has not been transformed by man: for example, the heat obtained from the combustion of fuel. Secondary - converted from primary, like, say, electricity.
Although oil plays an ever-smaller role in the production of the latter, it is oil products that occupy the first line in the overall energy balance of the Earth. They account for over 32% of the world's primary energy consumption. The reason is that a huge share is consumed by various types of transport - in total, even more than electricity generation. It is extremely difficult for transport to surpass oil as an energy carrier. And that's why.
One liter of hydrocarbon fuel contains four times more energy than one liter of liquid hydrogen, and tens of times more than one liter of a lithium battery. Moreover, hydrogen is many times more expensive, which makes its prospects unobvious. Electricity from the battery in terms of a kilometer of run is cheaper than "gasoline" or "diesel", but so far this allows the use of electric vehicles only as vehicles. For airplanes, as we have already written, the transition to batteries is impossible (they would weigh more than the structure itself), and for sea-going ships it is extremely difficult. Therefore, at least in aviation and maritime transport, such a replacement is unlikely in the next decades.
That is why the most advanced rocket of our time, the partially reusable Falcon 9, flies on kerosene, not hydrogen: the volume of fuel tanks required for hydrogen would make its body too large, and therefore heavier. For rockets of today's size - carrying no more than 60 tons of cargo into space - kerosene remains the main fuel.
Conclusion: moving away from oil as an energy carrier does not look as easy as it is often said. If it is real for a number of industries, then this has little effect on the consumption of oil, while it remains the most important fuel.
Stereotype # 2. Is it just fuel?
Another common story is that oil is used primarily as a fuel, and after being displaced by other sources, it becomes unnecessary.
However, analysis shows that petroleum products allow you to create objects without which it is simply impossible to imagine modern civilization.
For example, the main form of land transportation - cars and tractors - requires three billion tires a year, and their cost exceeds a quarter of a trillion dollars annually. Two-thirds of the rubber in them is made from oil, and natural rubber cannot displace them either by price or by a number of other parameters. On average, 26 liters of crude oil are processed for the production of one tire: that is, this industry alone consumes tens of millions of tons of black gold. There are no prospects of abandoning this huge array.
But cars need not only what to drive, but also the roads on which they move. The planet consumes more than one hundred million tons of asphalt per year - and 85% of it goes to the road surface. Another 15% - on roofs for residential buildings (asphalt shingles are popular in the USA) and some other elements in construction. They do not plan to abandon them in the foreseeable future.
Plastics are an even larger area of use for petroleum derivatives. In the modern world, they are made almost 50 kilograms per person per year - about 360 million tons. But in Europe these figures are 2.5 times higher. According to forecasts, by 2037 more than 0.7 billion tons of plastics will be produced on the planet, by the middle of the century - a billion. And it's not about packaging. If we look around, we can see that almost everything is made of plastic.
To obtain plastic from petroleum products, the molecular chains of hydrocarbons, as a rule, must be significantly lengthened. As a result, to get one kilogram of new material, two kilograms of oil will have to be spent. In other words, by the end of the 2030s, the plastics industry alone is expected to absorb 1.4 billion tons of crude oil, or 38 million barrels of oil, per day.
This is a huge figure, equal to about half of today's consumption. Most likely, the falling demand for oil as a fuel will be replaced by the consumption of oil as a raw material for plastics. Moreover, environmentally controversial plastic packaging (30% of plastics consumption) may lose ground. But pipes, synthetic fabrics and other products that last longer than analogues or replace fur and wool, on the contrary, will become more popular.
Output? If today a quarter of all oil is spent on the manufacture of plastics and other industrial needs (lubricants and the like), then by the middle of the century, according to some estimates, three quarters of today's production level, and even more, may be spent on these purposes.
Stereotype # 3. Oil is contained underground in large reservoirs
Oil flows freely underground like water, many of us think. In fact, it is found in micropores and thin cracks in various hard rocks. They are often so dense that they will feel like marble in the hand.
Over the past 50-70 years, the quality of oil reserves has deteriorated significantly. For example, for oil production, reservoir permeability is very important, that is, the ability of the rock to pass fluids and gases through itself. The higher it is, the easier it is to extract oil. Permeability is measured in units of darcy, or millidarcy (mD). For comparison: a typical Volga field in the 1950s had a permeability of <1000 mD, and now oilmen are developing reserves with a permeability of 1 mD or even less. That is, the modern rock containing oil is thousands of times worse for passing hydrocarbons to the wells than it was quite recently.
An example of even more complex reserves is the Bazhenov Formation. Surely everyone has heard about shale oil. The Russian Bazhenov formation is a kind of analogue in terms of the complexity of development. These reserves are classified as unconventional. This is when everyone knows where they are, but how to get them so that it is economically viable has not yet been decided.
The Bazhenov Formation consists of bitumen carbonate clayey and siliceous rocks. This is a super-dense rock, and not what we usually imagine when we hear the phrase "oil reservoir". Depending on the conditions and location, the permeability of Bazhen's rocks can be 0.01 mD. It turns out that modern reserves are at least a thousand times denser than in the last century, and bazhen is 100 times denser than the densest modern developed formations.
Why extract oil from such "stubborn" rocks? On the one hand, the "light" oil is coming to an end, and on the other, the Bazhenov formation contains huge reserves of raw materials, its geological resources are estimated from 18 to 60 billion tons. For comparison: about 550 million tons are mined annually in Russia.
Several years ago Gazprom Neft started looking for ways to develop bazhena. During this time, the cost of production was reduced from 30 to 16 thousand rubles per ton. So far, these are experimental projects, and a profitable production level of 8, 5 thousand rubles per ton is planned to be achieved already in 2021. After that, it will be possible to start developing bazhen on an industrial scale. With the help of what technologies it will be possible, as well as to find out what profit innovation brings to oil companies, you can in an interview with Alexey Vashkevich, Director for Technological Development of Gazprom Neft.
In addition to the Bazhenov Formation, there are many other rocks with colossal resources that are difficult to develop in Russia: the Achimov strata (34.4 billion tons), Domanic deposits (3-6 billion tons), the Paleozoic foundation (26 billion tons). All of them were discovered a long time ago, so why did the same Club of Rome say that oil will soon run out, despite such gigantic explored volumes of hydrocarbons?
The fact is that at that time many geological reserves were considered inaccessible for profitable development. And from time to time there were forecasts that oil would soon run out. Indeed, the reserves of that time are coming to an end, but the development of technologies allows us to start developing new, more complex ones.
Stereotype # 4. Easier than steamed oil
Traditionally, it is believed that oil production is a simple business. In fact, as we saw in the previous stereotype, this is not the case. And reducing the permeability of rocks by a thousand times is not the only difficulty. The very shape of the developed layers is also changing. If earlier they were wide and uniform, now they are thin and scattered. Taking into account the scale, drilling today is more like a vessel operation - you need to very accurately drive a well through a thin oil reservoir, without going beyond its limits. The evolution of well designs shows how the work of oil workers has changed.
Back in the 19th century in the Kuban, oil was extracted in special oil wells. From them, oil was scooped up with ladles, buckets and buckets. But already in 1866, technologies appeared in Russia that made it possible to drill a well 37.6 meters deep by the machine method, which gave the first oil gusher in the history of the country.
Further, the oil industry developed very quickly: a method of percussion drilling, new methods of strengthening the walls of wells, and reliable welded pipes appeared. All this had a significant impact on the growth of oil production, its efficiency and safety.
At the beginning of the 20th century, rotary drilling technologies began to be used, which, in combination with other improvements, made it possible to build vertical wells, similar to modern ones. It is relatively easy to build them - the force of gravity helps the drilling equipment to move down, and it is not difficult to strengthen the walls of the well. And already in the middle of the 20th century, oilmen had all the necessary technologies to develop giant fields in Western Siberia.
Vertical wells developed homogeneous formations up to 100 meters thick, which occurred at a relatively shallow depth. The oil literally came out to the surface under pressure in the reservoir.
Over the past 50 years, not only the permeability of oil rocks has changed dramatically, but also their thickness, which has decreased by more than 10 times. Today oilmen have to work with layers 2-3 meters thick.
For such thin and scattered reserves, vertical wells are not suitable - they will have too small an area of contact with the reservoir, which means that they will produce very little oil and will not recoup the costs of their construction.
Therefore, today high-tech horizontal wells are used for oil production. Thanks to special equipment, the boreholes of such wells gradually gain an angle of inclination and, as a result, can bend 90 ° in relation to their vertical part.
It is very difficult to drill horizontal wells. You need to blindly, focusing only on the calculations and readings of the instruments, at a depth of 2-3 kilometers to get into an oil reservoir only a few meters wide. Moreover, then it is necessary to drill hundreds of meters in the horizontal plane with pinpoint accuracy, repeating its trajectory and not going beyond its limits. Only in this case will the production of such a well be profitable.
Horizontal wells and their varieties are the norm these days. For example, about 80% of all wells that Gazprom Neft drills annually at its assets fall into this category.
Want to know what a well looks like underground? You can see this in a special video.
What other technologies are used by oilmen today? How do they create a controlled fracture at a depth of 3 kilometers? Watch this video!
Stereotype No. 5. The oil industry needs only drillers and geologists
Another stereotype is connected with the fourth stereotype: they say, only geologists and drillers work in the oil industry. This is not true.
Now exploration and production of liquid hydrocarbons often requires building a "digital twin" of the field - a task for which both machine learning and work with huge amounts of data are widely used. Digital technologies allow oilmen today to simulate many underground operations on special simulators, which help to select the optimal parameters for real work in the fields.
Mathematicians, physicists, chemists, programmers, engineers, construction workers and dozens of other professions today are working to ensure that oil production remains stable, profitable and efficient.
Think you could become an oil worker? Then take the Gazprom Neft career guidance test, which can tell you in which direction you could build a career in this industry. But the authors emphasize that in the test, the choice of professions for the humanities is limited, since the distribution is only in the specialties used in the oil and gas industry. So if you are a film director, then you may not find a worthy alternative in the oil industry. The test was created for students, but everyone can pass it - professions and recommendations are completely real!
Let's summarize. Oil is often associated with unpromising industries or professions. In fact, this is not the case. Yes, the quality of reserves has changed significantly over the past decades, but new technologies are helping oilmen find the "keys" for the profitable development of fields that seemed unsuitable for production 10-15 years ago. And their efforts are worth it, because today oil is not only fuel, but hundreds of other items and materials that we use every day. Now oilmen are representatives of dozens of specialties who help to extract "non-black gold".
More interesting facts about how oil is produced today can be found in this video.
The partner material was prepared jointly with the Gazprom Neft Science and Technology Center.