UK North Sea Summary Part I: Licensing, Drilling, Discoveries and Development

A Guest Post by George Kaplan

Discoveries and Development

The global peak in oil and gas production for UK occurred in 1999 and 2000, probably delayed by four or five years by the Piper Alpha tragedy, and will not be approached, far less exceeded, again. There have been two other local peaks, each one preceded by about ten to twelve years by a local peak in the number of discoveries. The UK Oil and Gas Authority does not publish individual field resources, but it’s a fair bet that the large fields were discovered early on and most of the recent discoveries are small, near field tie-ins.

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GoM Summary Part V: Possible Futures

A Guest Post by George Kaplan

This analysis concerns C&C only. Natural gas production is low and steadily declining with few deep gas-condensate discoveries and the shallow dry gas fields at end of life. I don’t know if lack of gas may affect oil production – e.g. insufficient: flow to allow stable pipeline operation; income to be economic to warrant continuing maintenance; or fuel gas or lift gas supply to surface facilities. Any such issues could influence shutdown timing and hence the possible stranding of assets.  

Top Down Production Projections

The chart above shows a Verhulst fit to GoM C&C production using seven curves, three describing shallow production and two each for deep and ultra-deep. A symmetric logistic curve is convenient for manual curve fitting as it allows a linear extrapolation to give the ultimate recovery, but most production curves are not symmetrical – usually the decline is less concave with a thicker tail, especially as the production volume and number of independent producing entities are reduced. With Excel, using least-squares optimisation fitting to any curve(s) is simple and has the benefit of allowing additional constraints to be imposed for sensitivity checks (e.g. total area, equivalent to the ultimate recovery, and position or height of peak), so more general Verhulst curves allow closer fitting.

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Non-OPEC Oil Production Starts to Rebound

A post by Ovi at peakoilbarrel

Below are a number of oil (C + C ) production charts for Non-OPEC countries created from data provided by the EIA’s International Energy Statistics and updated to June 2020.  Information from other sources such as OPEC, the STEO and country specific sites is used to provide a short term outlook for future output and direction for a few countries.

Non-OPEC production has started to rebound from the May low of 45,379 kb/d. According to the EIA, June’s output added 564 kb/d to May’s to end up 45,943 kb/d. Using data from the STEO, a projection for Non-OPEC output was made to September. September output is expected to rise to 48,739 kb/d, with the biggest increment occurring in July, close to 1,000 kb/d. Of the 1,000 kb/d, 500 kb/d will be provided by the US.

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