Summary of the process of finding and exploiting petroleum

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Greetings friends and supporters of the steemit platform. On this occasion I would like to explain briefly the whole process in the search for petroleum, while also talking about the process of extraction and production.

Introduction

Given the wide coverage made to cover certain expectations of the community interested in the content oriented to petroleum engineering and the relevant aspects to the petroleum industry, it is essential to make an article that summarizes some of the most important aspects regarding the search and exploitation of petroleum.

Thinking about the concerns that many may have regarding this whole process of exploration and production of petroleum and natural gas, I will present this article, which will be addressed to cover everything related to the process of exploitation of petroleum, explaining the ways used to search for its existence, to the different ways to extract and produce the precious liquid.

Taking into consideration that Venezuela is the country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world, our petroleum activity is the largest economic income and under which we must focus a large part of our knowledge. With all this preamble of ideas I start the development of the mentioned content.

Data indicating that Venezuela has the largest petroleum reserve in the world


Author of the image: HêRø. Licensing: public domain. Map updated with the proven oil reserves in the world.

If we look at the scale that goes from 0 to 301 billion bbl, we would see that the countries with the largest petroleum reserves are those located with the darkest blue color, and if we look at the distribution of the map we can see that one of the countries that is located with the dark blue color is Venezuela, likewise the other countries that are the same color belong to OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries).

However, the data that best explains why Venezuela is really the country with the largest reserves in the world is the graph below:


Author of the image: Plazak. Licensing: CC BY-SA 3.0. Trends in proved oil reserves in top five countries, 1980-2013 (date from US Energy Information Administration).

In the graph shown, it can be seen that it is not until 2010 that Venezuela can scale up in the quantification of reserves, until it reaches the year 2013 where it exceeds the reserves of the country that until that year had the largest oil reserves as is Saudi Arabia.

Currently, the trend continues, placing Venezuela with the largest petroleum reserves in the world, and Saudi Arabia in second place.

Perhaps you can ask yourself, what is the connection between Venezuela being the country with the largest reserves in the world and the issue of petroleum exploration and production?

To answer this question, I must begin by telling you that due to my Venezuelan nationality, and many of my compatriots who follow me in steemit, I have been led to reason that it is necessary to make a summary of the technical operations that involve the entire process of searching for and producing petroleum, reasons such as the great demand for hydrocarbons worldwide, and having the largest reserves in the world, leads me to think that most compatriots are in the duty to manage and understand much of the information associated with the exploration and production of hydrocarbons.

The world population growth has made that we have more and more indexes in the demand of energy, the industrialization and the technological advance in the matter of urbanism, transport and infrastructure has made that the industrialized countries demand great amount of petroleum and natural gas, reason why to understand in a general and basic way the processes of exploration and production of these hydrocarbons can locate to us like a conscious society of our production on the basis of a harmonic conscience of balance between consumption and the rational use of this important resource.

Hydrocarbon exploration

The certainty of finding oil ends once we finish drilling an exploratory well where important petrophysical and geological information is collected for the development of the producing field with the drilling of new wells in that particular oil field.

In the drilling of the oil wells, taking into account the complexity of the equipment to be used, the operations and supervision tasks in the construction of the oil well are carried out with the knowledge that the geologists can contribute, especially in the registration of lithological information. The mechanical engineer is a fundamental part as a supervisor in the maintenance and repair tasks of the drill rig.

The petroleum engineer is an essential part in building the design of the well construction and carrying out the supervision in the activities of undressing, moving, dressing of the drilling rig, along with supervising the drilling activities in the different phases in the construction of the well, being this one the main responsible for the success or failure in the completion of the well construction.

The exploration or search for hydrocarbons is carried out based on a set of techniques that carry intrinsic knowledge in very important areas such as physics and mathematics that are applied to establish communication between the fluids that may be present in the subsoil and the seismic records that are recorded on the surface. These records are studied by the geologists, and once the prospective evaluation task is completed, the decision is made as to whether that studied area is a candidate for drilling and to find out more about the lithological and pressure study found in the subsurface.

When I did my internship with the company Datalog de Venezuela C.A. I did it as a mudlogger that is to say as an information recorder of drilling mud cuttings.

During these internships in the PDV-09 drill hole I was able to reflect on the importance of geological information in both exploratory and development wells.

The mudlogger activity consisted of collecting a sample of mud and drill bit cuttings from the shale, they were taken to be analyzed, a dry sample was analyzed after being taken to the oven and another wet sample was packed and taken to be analyzed by the company in the laboratories outside the location.

The dry sample that was analyzed on site was very important to keep a lithologic record every 10 feet of drilling to know the type of formation that was being crossed, this with the intention of helping with information to other wells that are intended to be drilled in the area, with this we can be prevented for example to know at what depth we can make a change of wick, because if at a certain depth we know that we are going to meet with some limestone, for its hardness is advisable to use wicks with a greater cutting capacity.


Author of the image: Qfl247. Licensing: CC BY-SA 3.0. A picture of a mud log in process. Mud logging is the process of recording the lithology a rotary drill penetrates, typically used in oil well drilling.

In the image shown above you can see the drilling mud slice sample analysis activities, commonly referred to as mudlogging.

Within the exploration activities it is very important that we understand in a simple way what a field is, since it is a term that from now on will be very touched in most of my publications, and that apart from this is directly involved with the exploration methods used to determine the hydrocarbon content area.

A reservoir is an entity that accumulates hydrocarbons in a natural way. In order for the reservoir to exist, a series of geological requirements must be met, such as geological traps that stop the oil from migrating and storing it in these reservoirs, which must have porous and permeable characteristics so that the oil can be extracted in an optimal and commercially productive manner.

Within the parameters that can vary from a reservoir are the thickness of the sand containing the hydrocarbon, its lithology, pore pressures, porosity, permeability, all this will depend on the geological conditions and trapping to which it was subjected during its formation and accumulation stage.

There is software that helps us in the study and analysis of the shape of an oil field, for example the structural maps give us an indication of the depth that we can achieve with the petroleum field.

Next I show an image that gives relation to a contour map:


Author of the image: Richard Banks. Licensing: CC BY-SA 3.0. Screenshot image generated by MCS contour map software.

In the example above, a gas and oil reservoir located at a depth of 8500 feet can be seen. Under its description and interpretation and with a theoretical basis based on geology, it can be said that there is a fault line located between the blue - green contour lines and the purple - red - yellow contour lines. Another description that can be made of the map is that the upper part of the reservoir is made of oil, and because gas floats on oil, the thin red line can be seen delimiting the zone of gas/oil contact.

Drilling of petroleum wells

The drilling of oil wells is done with the intention of creating a communication mechanism between the reservoir (in the subsoil) and the surface, since through this conduit (well) the oil in production will circulate from the subsoil to the surface.

Drilling operations are very complex activities that demand a large amount of equipment to be used, a contingent of personnel involving engineers, supervisors, workers, which make us have income from the extraction of this valuable resource such as petroleum.

Drilling activities are based on two types of wells: exploratory wells and developing wells. Exploratory wells are those that are made taking into account that it is not certain that oil will be obtained in the prospective field, and that all the geological and petrophysical information collected during its drilling is valuable for the drilling of new wells. While the wells under development are drilled taking into account all the information necessary to put into production based on the established production requirements.

Each well is unique, no matter how much information is collected from neighboring wells, the geological characteristics, pressures and even the operational form in which the wells are drilled vary among them, so it is advisable to assume an alert behavior before the drilling operations for future problems that may arise as pipe sticking, early wear of the drilling wick, drilling fluid circulation losses, pipe sticking, high reservoir pressures among others.

The widespread history of well drilling began with the Chinese, who started these activities by drilling water wells, later oil wells were drilled with which the technique could be spread to other parts of the world. At first the technique used to drill the well was percussion, this technique did not handle a drilling fluid that could control the formation pressures, so it quickly had to be replaced by the rotation technique.

It was the United States of America that perfected the technique to the point of employing the rotary technique. The first well drilled with this technique is the Drake well in Pennsylvania in the year 1859 at a depth of 69 feet.

Already in Venezuela our own oil history was beginning to take shape, and by the year 1878 oil exploration and production activities began in the Alquitrana field in the State of Táchira, these were shallow wells with a depth of more or less 27 meters. Then the oil boom moved to the Lake Maracaibo Basin, specifically on the western coast of the lake with the drilling of the Zumaque I well in 1914, after which the same work continued in the muddy wells I and II in Cabimas on the eastern coast of the lake until Venezuela was positioned as one of the producing countries of the time.

The following image specifies the most important equipment involved in the oil well drilling process:


Author of the image: 1. Oil_Rig_NT8.jpg: *derivative work: Mudgineer (talk). 2. Oil_Rig_NT.PNG: Tosaka. 3. derivative work: Malyszkz (talk). Licensing: CC BY-SA 3.0. Oil drilling rig, simple illustration.

basically at point 1 the drilling fluid is stored, which is pumped by the mud pumps located at point 2 of the diagram.

The drilling mud is pumped through the flow line from point 2 to point 3 which is the flow line, until it reaches point 8 which is the standpipe.

The drilling mud passes through the hose and all the connected piping system until it reaches the top drive located at point 18 passing through all the points indicated in the figure from point 18, to point 24.

After all this drilling fluid travel, it enters the drill string located at point 25. It exits through the drill string returning through the annular space until it reaches the mud tanks again.

This whole process occurs while at the bottom of the hole the wick rotates and cuts off pieces of the formation that are dragged by the drilling mud. This process is what is known in the drilling industry as well drilling, which is very necessary for the construction of the well and the future extraction of the petroleum.

Production of hydrocarbons

For the production of oil wells, it is important to make decisions when choosing the production method to be applied. For example, in my experience in the drilling area, I was able to see that although the wells being drilled in the Barúa-Motatán-La Ceiba zone could produce by natural flow, since a large part of the energy of those reservoirs was sufficient to lift that column of oil fluid under pressure, The decision was made to complete the wells by natural flow with a production sleeve but at the same time an electrically submersible pump was lowered, since this pressure declined rapidly and thus the time to recondition the well to lower a pump was avoided, thus minimizing production costs in the drilling and completion of the wells.

It is important to emphasize that the design of the production method depends on the supply and demand production curve, this consists of a graph where the flowing bottom pressures are plotted vs. restriction pressures by well accessories, if the supply curve that is the pressure with which the oil is estimated to flow is greater than the pressure losses that have to be broken for that oil to reach the surface then the well flows naturally, otherwise some alternative artificial production method must be chosen as:

  • Mechanical pumping, the rocker arm is the pump that extracts oil from the subsoil to the surface in a mechanical way, generally the wells that are completed with this method of production are the shallow wells, an example of this are the wells on the eastern coast of the Lake such as Bachaquero, Mene Grande, Lagunillas and Cabimas.

      


    Author of the image: Flcelloguy. Licensing: GNU Free Documentation License. Mechanical pump (rocker arm)

Conclusion and contributions

We can summarize the exploration and production of oil as the art possessed by petroleum engineers, engineers in geology, petrophysicists and other experts in the search for hydrocarbons to obtain the area where the oil and/or natural gas is found through studies in geology and seismology, where it is even necessary to characterize deposits through the study and analysis of structural maps, applying drilling techniques and using all the equipment involved to finally put petroleum and/or natural gas into production through production methods.

Production methods can vary between starting to produce a well naturally, that is to say that it produces oil due to the natural pressure of the reservoir, to methods such as mechanical, electro-submersible pumping and artificial lifting by gas.

Once oil is already being produced, it can be separated into different phases, study its quality and composition, and then be transported to the refineries where it will be converted into processed by-products such as gasoline, oils, plastic, and asphalt among others.


Author of the image: Walter Siegmund (talk). Licensing: GNU Free Documentation License. Oil refinery

References consulted and recommended

[1]Oil Well

[2]Well drilling

[3]Drilling rig

[4]Drilling fluid

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