Crude reserves

Several forecasters (4) have predicted that the world s crude reserves are weighted about two to one in favor of heavy versus light crudes. Consequently the inevitable trend is that the average crude processed will become heavier. Market forces, regional demand, environmental considerations and other factors will determine the economics and justification for heavy oil conversion. But it is clear that in the global scene, there will be an increasing supply, of heavy oil. 

Twentieth Century Petroleum Statistics, 64th ed. 2008. Dallas DeGolyer and MacNaughton. Published annually. Covers primarily U.S. statistics, with some world data. Despite the title, it does include twenty-first century data. U.S. statistics include crude reserves, production, imports by source, producing oil and gas wells, refining capacity, natural gas reserves, drilling costs, and much more. 

Having defined and gathered data adequate for an initial reserves estimation, the next step is to look at the various options to develop the field. The objective of the feasibility study is to document various technical options, of which at least one should be economically viable. The study will contain the subsurface development options, the process design, equipment sizes, the proposed locations (e.g. offshore platforms), and the crude evacuation and export system. The cases considered will be accompanied by a cost estimate and planning schedule. Such a document gives a complete overview of all the requirements, opportunities, risks and constraints. 

The MTG process was developed for synfuel production in response to the 1973 oil crisis and the steep rise in crude prices that followed. Because methanol can be made from any gasiftable carbonaceous source, including coal, natural gas, and biomass, the MTG process provided a new alternative to petroleum for Hquid fuels production. New Zealand, heavily dependent on foreign oil imports, utilizes the MTG process to convert vast offshore reserves of natural gas to gasoline (59). 

Table 3. Estimates of Proved Reserves and Production of Crude Petroleum in the United States, 10 ...

The United States became the world s first producer of deep crude oil from an oil well when in 1859 Colonel Edwin Drake successfully used a pipe drilled into the ground to obtain oil. From then until about 1970, the United States was virtually energy-independent with only some oil and gas imports from Mexico and Canada. Wliile U.S. reserves of coal, natural gas and uranium continue to be large enough to supply internal demand with enough left over to export, the supply of oil took a sharp turn downward. After 1970, even while U.S. demand continued to increase at a steep 6.5 percent per year, the supply of U.S. oil began to decline, necessitating sharp increases in U.S. oil imports. 

As crude oil reserves dwindle, the marketplace will either transition to the electrifying of the transportation system (electric and fuel-cell vehicles and electric railways), with the electricity being produced by coal, natural gas, nuclear and renewables, or see the development of an industry to produce liquid fuel substitutes from coal, oil shale, and tar sands. It might also turn out to be a combination of both. The transition will vary by nation and will be dictated strongly by the fuels available, the economic and technological efficiencies of competitive systems, the relative environmental impacts of each technology, and the role government takes in the marketplace. 

The abihty to recover as much as possible of the remaining two-thirds of conventional oils in known formations and to utilize ultraheavy erode deposits will become increasingly important as U.S., and ultimately worldwide, reserves of conventional crude oils are depleted. 

There is a need to seek an environmentally benign, technically feasible and economical alternative fuel because of the limited crude oil reserves and serious pollution all over the world. Recently, dimethyl ether (DME) is proved to be used as an alternative clean fuel in transportation, power generation and household use for its excellent behavior in compression ignition for combustion, cetane number of over 55 and zero sulfur content, and is praised as a super-clean fuel in the 21 century. It has a promising foreground of application. Therefore, the efficient synthesis of DME from syngas derived from natural gas, coal or biomass has drawn much attention. 

Sulfur for commercial purposes is derived mainly from native elemental sulfur mined by the Frasch process. Large quantities of sulfur are also recovered from the roasting of metal sulfides and the refining of crude oil, i.e., from the sulfur by-products of purified sour natural gas and petroleum (the designation sour is generally associated with high-sulfur petroleum products). Reserves of elemental sulfur in evaporite and volcanic deposits and of sulfur associated with natural gas,... 

It is already evident that the turnover rate of a transmitter is only a crude measure of its release rate. Further limitations are that there is appreciable intraneuronal metabolism of some neurotransmitters notably, the monoamines. In such cases, turnover will overestimate release rate. Another problem, again affecting monoamines, is that some of the released neurotransmitter is taken back into the nerve terminals and recycled. This leads to an underestimate of release rate. Despite these drawbacks, studies of turnover rates uncovered some important features of transmitter release. In particular, they provided the first evidence for distinct functional pools of monoamines, acetylcholine and possibly other neurotransmitters a release pool, which could be rapidly mobilised for release, and a storage or reserve pool which had a slower turnover rate. 

South America and Western Europe). But the large reserves of near-surface subbituminous coals and lignites are also being looked upon as future sources of synthetic fuel gases and liquid hydrocarbons that would augment production of synthetic crude oils from, e.g., Northern Alberta s oil sands (4). 

As the world s known crude oil reserves diminish, we are confronted with the prospect of treating progressively less desirable crude oils. These materials contain high levels (typically several percent) of organic sulfur and nitrogen, as well as organically complexed vanadium and nickel at the level of... 

Since the early 1900s, the government-owned petroleum and oil shale properties were envisioned as a way to provide a reserve supply of crude oil to fuel U.S. naval vessels in times of emergencies. The Reserves were mostly undeveloped until the 1970s, when the country began look-... 

To measure the lifetime of hydrocarbon reserves, often the static lifetime of reserves (also called the reserve production ratio) is calculated as the ratio between reserves and the annual production of the current year. A criticism of this approach is that it seems unrealistic to assume that the production of, e.g., crude oil will remain constant in future at today s level, and then suddenly fall from a high level down to zero it can rather be expected that there will be an increase to a peak production and then a gradual decline in production. 

Table 3.2 shows the remaining potential (the sum of reserves and resources) of conventional oil at the end of 2005, which amounts to around 1800 Gb, made up of 1200 Gb reserves and 600 Gb resources. In line with the definition in Section 3.3.1, these figures do not include unconventional oil, such as crude bitumen from oil sands production in Canada or extra heavy oil from Venezuela.11 Almost three-quarters of... 

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