(This post is by my colleague Heading Out over at The Oil Drum. HO does a great job with this post demonstrating to the layperson the problems we face with petroleum recovery in this era of peak oil. The lesson here is that this problem is occurring with many of the older large wells, and there are not nearly enough new large wells being brought online that can match the capacity of the older large wells.)
Dogru, Hamoud & Barlow JPT 0204
Originally uploaded by Heading Out.
For most people there was some one thing that brought the reality of Peak Oil home to them. For me it was this picture, from a paper by Dogru, Hamoud and Barlow in JPT in February 2004. The reference, to the paper “Multiphase Pump Recovers More Oil in a Mature Carbonate Reservoir” can be found here.
It shows a vertical slice taken through the Abqaiq oilfield in Saudi Arabia, using an instrument that measures the relative fluid densities at different levels in the field.
