Sustainability and innovation: an oil company’s view
Shell Petroleum talks about how they see the future in this video
World Innovation Forum panel discussion:
“From Here to Sustainability: What Will It Take?”
This panel discussion, moderated by Jonathan Fahey, Associate Editor at Forbes, featured Joel Makower, Executive Editor and co-founder of Green World Media publications, and Libby Cheney, VP Safety, Environment and Sustainable Development for Shell Upstream Americas, discussing what it will take to get us from “here” to a sustainable energy future.
This discussion took place on June 9, 2010 in New York City at the World Innovation Forum with more than 50 luncheon attendees.
Libby Cheney says: “In offshore continental shelf areas that have previously been restricted, we estimate that there are 86 billion barrels of oil that is enough to fuel 85 million cars for 35 years.”
“There is 420 trillion cubic feet of gas in the outer continental shelf of the US and that’s enough to fuel about 100 million homes for 60 years.”
So, I just wonder why this vast resource was not yet tapped?
I found this article: http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallochthonous/2010/05/drilling_for_oil_is_more_risky.php and it says: “The offshore drilling industry is currently undergoing a transition. Most easy targets have already been developed, and yet global demand for oil is not abating. In an attempt to quench this thirst, attention is moving into more technically challenging areas, with more complex geology and often in the deeper waters of the outer continental shelf continental slope. The increasing complexity of the equipment required to drill in such areas increases the number of things that can go wrong, and the location of the drilling makes dealing with catastrophic failures much more difficult” . . . “Even if you set aside the climatic impacts of using oil to fuel our civilisation, there are environmental risks associated with drilling for it and transporting it. But I’m not sure that many people fully appreciate that for the newer oil fields that are being developed, and proposed for development, these risks are potentially much higher. The fact that current industry practices have, on the whole, not led to major spills in the past couple of decades* is no guarantee that they reduce the risks to acceptable levels at these new, more extreme drilling locations. This is especially true when, in the absence of rigorous regulatory scrutiny, oil companies are tempted to take shortcuts that may not have led to disaster in the past, but could be catastrophic where the margins of safety are lower.”
With all the advances in technology in the US, what is preventing oil companies to come up with a safer way to drill for oil?
Hey Grace, I just found a nice website discussing the difficulties within oil drilling process
http://www.lloydminsterheavyoil.com/drilling.htm
check this paragraph: “An unexpected pressure in the subsurface can cause a blowout. The overbalance is lost and the fluids flow out of the subsurface rocks into the well in what is called a kick. As the water, gas, or oil flows into the well, it mixes with the drilling mud, causing it to become even lighter and exert less pressure on the bottom of the well. The diluted drilling mud is called gas cut, salt-water cut, or oil cut.”
But I still wonder why does oil appear in such places that make drilling a hard task, I mean are there certain geological rules that control the places where oil accumulates?