Modern Oil Drilling and Unconventional Sources – Video

Transcript:

Drilling for oil today starts with the same technology it has for about a century: the rotary drill bit. It’s attached to a pipe which is built into sections called a drill string. The rig rotates the pipe, rotates the bit, and cuts into the earth. Mud is pumped down the drill string and flushes out rock cuttings back to the surface. This technology has improved over the years but here’s where the dramatic changes start. This section here sends three-dimensional information about the position of the bit back to the operators who can now control the direction precisely. They are able to bend steel pipe 90 degrees or more and drill into this layer here. This process called geosteering has ushered in a whole new era of oil exploration. Operators are now able to drill for a 10-foot window from ten thousand feet away. Offshore drilling is the same, just a lot more complicated. This platform floats in 10,000 feet of water. Once on the seafloor, it has to drill down another ten to fifteen thousand feet. That’s 25 thousand feet of pipe they’re controlling. That’s hard to visualize. Imagine this shoe box is a drilling platform. One section of 60-foot pipe is 90 times longer than this soda straw, and that’s just one section. Now imagine trying to hit a target the size of a frisbee by moving the straw all the way back here. It takes offices full of people and equipment and billions of dollars to make this work. It’s difficult technology in difficult environments and it has its risks, but with conventional onshore fields in decline, the world is looking to evermore complex ways to obtain oil.

The traditional way to find oil was to look for large reservoirs, but in fact, oil is not found in a big tank. It’s found in rocks that look like this, with billions of tiny connected pores. We drill a straight well pressure from the overlying layers squeezes the oil up the drill string to the surface. But many of these reservoirs have been found, so we’re looking for new ways to find oil in rocks like this. The oil here migrated from the source rock here, which we know was once organic mud. This rock, too, contains tiny pores, but they’re so microscopic the producers had no way to get the oil out economically. With horizontal drilling and fracturing directly in this layer, we’re producing oil from so-called unconventional reservoirs directly from the source rock. And there are other new sources of oil like oil shale, which looks like this. The organics here- dead plankton- have transformed into kerogen, the precursor to oil, and we can heat this to convert it to oil. And there’s also heavy oil or oil sands. This stuff won’t flow. You may have heard about it in Canada, where it’s near the surface it can be mined and then heated, and the oil is released. Most are deeper, though, and are recovered with a cleaner process that heats it underground by pumping in steam and then pumping out oil and water. These processes have environmental concerns: they use a lot of water, and they need a lot of heat. That usually comes from natural gas and their emissions from burning it. In terms of CO₂, these processes emit 5 to 20% more than conventional oil. They’re also significantly more expensive. When oil prices are high enough, companies can afford to produce this unconventional oil.