In order to produce from unconventional reservoirs, industry uses a stimulation technique like hydraulic fracturing to create cracks in the underground rock that allow the oil or natural gas to flow. Of course this is more time-consuming and costly than producing from a reservoir that requires no stimulation beyond a pumpjack or wellhead compressor. So if conventional resources are easy and inexpensive to develop, why are we going after unconventional oil and gas now?
Take a look at crude oil reserves. Canada has billion barrels of oil reserves, of which billion barrels are oil sands reserves. Extra-heavy oil and oil sands are categorized as unconventional oil, along with light tight oil, also known as shale oil. It revolves around extraction through a vertical borehole.
It most commonly requires horizontal wells to be bored. Alternatively, hydraulic fracturing fracking is also used. Conventional oil extraction is what most of us will be familiar with when we think of drilling for oil.
Drilling down vertically, letting the resources flow up to us, hopefully in a nice and easy way. Of course, this depends on the degree of homogeneity within the reservoir; the more faults or fractures in the reservoir, the less efficient the recovery of crude oil.
This form of oil production takes place both onshore and offshore. Our oil and gas investment company is predominantly interested in conventional plays. Unconventional oil extraction, as previously alluded to, is much more complex than conventional, with output diminishing much more rapidly than its conventional counterpart. Producing from these low permeability gas and oil reservoirs requires multistage horizontal and fracking technologies. What unconventional techniques have done, more than anything else, is revolutionise the natural gas shale gas industry.
Over the past couple of decades, much more stringent regulation has been put into place surrounding onshore unconventional operations. The debate surrounding fracking has always been contentious. Public opinion swings this way and that more than a little frequently, with the UK Government even u-turning at one point recently over their stance on the issue. But why exactly is hydraulic fracturing so keenly contested an issue? Well, for most of its critics, it has a lot to do with potential environmental impacts.
Because of this, new technologies are constantly being introduced that allows for the more economic extraction of non-traditional oil and gas that may have been previously impossible to obtain. Development of these unconventional resources has significant economic potential as a large portion of oil and gas resources is estimated to exist in unconventional deposits. Fossil Fuels. Nuclear Fuels. Acid Rain. Climate Change. Climate Feedback. Ocean Acidification.
Rising Sea Level. Conventional vs unconventional resource Conventional resources and unconventional resources are two very different, separate sets of resources that can potentially be extracted. Unconventional Oil Resources. June 5, Conventional vs.
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