Offshore Geologist Job

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okay, originally this talk was going to be called the lifecycle of oil, really got into it and it's a long history there, so we're just going to look at a component of that. so we're going to do life cycle



Offshore Geologist Job

Offshore Geologist Job, of oil geology rocks. a couple geologists get that joke nice work. all right so you know here's my outline, but basically what we're going to do is we're going to


introduce what oil is we're going to make some simplifications around the concept of oil but really want to what i want to instill with you is that creating oil is sort of a recipe process where there are certain components processes and outcomes that create the end product what is oil. big picture why i'm even talking about oil so in the


office of fossil energy we're working on a crude oil characterization study and what we're trying to do there is compare conventional and unconventional oils and these are these are terms i'm going to address a little bit but you've probably heard them now with the the shale revolution increases in domestic production um it's a game changer in the


united states so we're going to touch on that, but really again the interest here is describing geologic controls on unconventional oil. so let's get into it. so first some some information. i'm a former eia energy information analyst administration analyst geologist, there i see some people in the audience, thanks for coming out. so i'm going to use a lot


of their work date they provide excellent infographics, data, maps and i'm going to use them throughout the this presentation. so, it's really just important points here oil is a mixture of hydrocarbons, it's a soup of all sorts of entrained gases, inert volatile gases, water, muck it's a soup and because it's so it exists on a wide spectrum of


properties it presents challenges when you deal with it and one of those challenges is has been with the increase in unconventional oil production there's been an increase in shipping crude by rail. you may have heard out in just the general environment that there have been some incidents of derailment, some real tragic losses, so this is a real issue


that we're trying to work on here at doe. so, just we got to introduce oil so really here's a picture of hydrocarbons. again, hydrocarbons exist on it's sort of the spectrum where different properties at both ends so if we look at these we're increasing in sort of have any heavy density materials to lighter essentially more pure material so if we


call these heterogeneous mixtures there's a lot of stuff in there and we make all these homogeneous mixtures sort of single component and again if we think about this in the context of transporting crude oil it's how do these properties influence that that transport so that's something really to consider as we move forward. so we're going to do


this sort of a in a geologic context but also in a state profile setting. this is again information from eia, i've modified it slightly, um i don't know if it's still in the eia color palette so we'll have to review that... that's an inside eia joke. ok, so what we have here ,excuse me, essentially is production volumes on the left axis on the x-axis


the y-axis on the x-axis is api gravity. so, if we go back, i'm sorry, when we say low api gravity, we mean dense or heavy stuff and when we say hi api gravity we mean lighter stuff. so, if we look at this california profile, they produce primarily heavy oils. if we look at texas, huge state lots of producing areas, they have a more normal distribution of a


demographic where they produce a variety of heavy middle and white oils and then there's north dakota an area of unconventional oil production which predominantly produces this white oil. so again, you know, for simplification sort of heavier oil profiles lighter oil profiles more unconventional oils more conventional oils.


so let's begin really what where every oil and gas talk should begin at the sun. so, really what's going on here is you know our solar system formed many many billions of years ago, the sun is undertaking hydrogen fusion converting hydrogen into helium, in doing so emitting electromagnetic radiation and energy,


and 93 million miles later, michael, in his previous talk, did a great job sort of outline some some geology here. so really just to take away a few points, density matters at everywhere but on earth especially. so, we have heavier materials that kind of sink into the core, we have lighter materials on top and because everything is sort of density driven these lighter materials


can surf on top of these heavier material and that's really important in the geologic rock cycle where you'll have mountain building events, erosion occurring, sediments running downhill everything's gravity-driven density driven. but most critically earth provides the base components to produce oil and specifically we'll look at the


atmosphere co2 carbon dioxide as a source,but what's most important critical about earth with respect to oil is life were fortunate to exist on be here today but really what's going on here is these organisms are capturing solar energy and converting it into organic material organic materials. so you know we've got jellyfish, we've got


diatoms, we've got krill, we've got algae, we have all these little critters floating all all around the oceans and rivers and lakes and and again they're capturing that that light energy and turning it into organic material. so these these organisms over time are going to to do this. so this is a picture from space- that's the tip of brittany


and france and that's whales, and what we have here is a massive algae bloom. so, when you think about sort of the scale, what we have going on is basically a photosynthesis and carbon sequestration at a massive scale where again white energy is coming down hitting these organisms they're taking in co2 they're creating an organic


material and then they're dying and they're sinking to the bottom of the ocean. so over time, huge volumes of this organic material builds up.so so this is sort of the recipe i wanted to introduce where we have this solar energy combined with this organic materials combined with time heat and pressure and we get this precursor material to hydrocarbons


called kerrigan on you know black rock, oily to the touch um really just hydrocarbon rich compressed material and with more time, heat, and pressure this rock is going to be converted into these liquids or gases and essentially that the it's called catagenesis but it's the process of converting this kerogen in into hydrocarbons that we


use today. so oils like a cake in that sense where we've got these ingredients, we've got a process to to combine them together, and then we have to cook them um just right and so this is sorry this is where i need to stop and spend a few seconds here talking about a lot going on. so we talked we've introduced the terms conventional and unconventional.


conventional oils, michael introduced the term - sweet spot, conventional oils were sort of a sweet spot play where there were fewer areas where oil and gas had over time migrated. with respect to oil and gas, you need a couple things here so i'll just point them out. you need a seal, you need an impermeable layer to track everything down, you need a source that


organic material that we talked about. you need migration paths usually between those so i love this um as michael described stuff wants to rise sometimes out of the air so oil and gas will migrate upward. and so when we talk about unconventional today, we've been traditionally targeting these sweet spots, these reservoirs where oil and gas


it migrated to. what's distinct about unconventional oil, is now we're targeting source rock, we're creating flow paths that previously didn't exist. so what that really is why that really is a game changer is we've gone from limited areas of production to essentially massive areas of production. so connecting this diagram to this and


sort of reintroducing this cake concept,when you bake a cake just right - you've got that perfect fluffiness the perfect moisture content, and and if you imagine sort of putting preparing that cake batter doing all that work and then in the oven if we introduce again time pressure and heat over time stuff sinks, so older stuff is below younger stuff. as you sink, pressure increases with that


pressure temperature increases also this concept that will just touch on is thermal maturity it's basically how well you bake that cake. so with respect to oil, there's a window as a function of time pressure and heat where you'll find oil if it's too cold you won't create that oil if it's too hot you're going to cook off that oil and you'll be


primarily left with gas and then to such an extent you'll essentially cook off that gas and that's what's called over mature source rock. so unconventional oil exists potentially in a lot of places. it may be deeper, it may be more challenging to reach, but the greater volumes incentivize us to to look for that. so back at my time at eia, i worled with a


great group of colleagues on updating the shale plays of the lower 48 states and again with what i want to speak to here is the prevalence of these shale resources, these tight formations we're really well endowed in the united states. each play has its own unique age so if we go back in the cambrian to the maya scene we're


going from older periods in time to newer periods in time so as i said stuff is sort of layered the old stuff at the bottom and the younger stuff is at the top and that geologic history drives what type of oil you may have. so to do this we're going to take a little trip so please keep your arms and legs in the vehicle and we're going to go back in


time. so, just to set this up, what i'm going to show you are past environments. right now we are 550 million years in the past a long time ago um and what we had here this is work out of northern arizona university, but what they've done is they've recreated past environments with respect to modern countries. so, in this example we have canada and


the united states as would have existed 550 million years ago. and this blue stuff is oceans, the darker stuff is deeper oceans, lighter ocean and then these are continents. if you recall, i said continents are sort of made out of this lighter material, so this stuff can kind of surf on the earth's surface and what we're going to do is we're going to go from 550 million years ago


to the present and walk sort of how the domestic united states, the lower 48 changes over that time and i'm going to stop off a few places to point out some stuff. so well again what you're going to see are oceans changing, land masses sort of moving, doing a dance so we'll just start going and we're going to move through time so you can watch that. so


we're in the late precambrian, a long time ago, sea level is changing again you can sort of see modern states underlying so right now the united states is covered in a shallow sea you'll see sort of these components in hou van and mississippi if you were to match that up with this map there are geologic there are geologic structures that match


this this setting so we'll keep going. we'll keep going ordovician a long time ago, fish are starting to show up, first sort of algae things are starting to grow on the earth - silurian first bony fish, very exciting times for everyone. okay, case study one,because i've got some bony fish fans nice... that was a big deal just before we didn't have bony


fish and now we do. so here we are in the north dakota as i said unconventional oil and we're now in the devonian period. so 400 million years ago a long time ago, but what we're going to see here is a really prolific inland sea migrate across north dakota you may have heard the bakken formation so when we produce oil and gas from this area


it's a result of the shallow sea activity so we'll just go through the devonian really quickly and as you can see that that inland sea is migrating across north dakota so sediments are running off those organisms that i talked about earlier are dying and they're getting stacked and covered with with sediments so it's building up over time.


so we'll just keep going, keep going. so we were in an old period and we're again moving forward through thr pennsylvania beautiful coal is developing in pennsylvania and ohio um so now we're at texas so texas has a wide profile of oil and gas and that's because texas is massive and it has a unique geologic history. so if we look at this section of


the map, we're talking about the permian section now so 290 million years ago and as you can see in west texas a beautiful inland sea about the size of syria is forming and we've got these matching permian plays to produce oil from we also have older stuff that we should have mentioned in the past but cambrian stuff so we'll just keep going basically


seeds are migrating across texas for the long haul so much oil so much gas or precursors to oil and gas long history long history still in the cretaceous. so this is when dinosaurs are about to go extinct unfortunately but we'll keep going keep going and we're getting into an environment that's sort of you know more similar to what we have today only


40 million years ago, florida has yet to form, but now we're in the legacian.okay so last stop so i said in the past that north dakota has light unconventional oil, texas sort of has all types of oil, here in california we have mostly heavy oil and if we remember that it's a function of time, heat, and pressure if we look at the the california resources


that we would develop oil and gas from there just forming only pretty recently 15 million years ago so we're just essentially putting them in that oven to bake, so they really don't have enough time to fully cook, to become sort of lighter and fluffier than than other oils. so we'll just fast forward through time and interesting you can watch the


the baja of california migrate up, they say california is going to fall off eventually that's totally true. you can see it migrating up. so you know last ice age sea levels were lower because we had all this water trapped up um. but here we are today. so, what i wanted to just touch is because of that trip we just went through, we have a lot


of oil and gas we had a lot of organic material being deposited in a variety of environments over a long history across a large area so because of that the shale revolution has been really successful in this country just simply because the resources there, the geology is there, the time and the heat and the pressure, all there


the recipe really works in the united states so again if if we think about you know the timing of stuff how it matters and where it's located as a function of time heat and pressure we get these hydrocarbons with with different properties and that's important again. you know in the concept of crude by rail, how do we how we transport a gas


versus something that's almost a solid? you don't transport them the same. so, you know again when it comes to oil you want to be in that perfect window, you want to make that cake that that is just right, and here in the united states we're really fortunate to have a lot of areas that exist in this oil window and then we have a lot of areas that exist


in the gas window. so again these geologic controls are really what drives our our resource abundance here and because again there's a long history there we'll just deal with these properties of crude oil on in different manners, but here at doe we're working with our partners at dot fmcsa, transport canada, our neighbors to


the north, to try to get a handle on these properties and how this property influence hazards with respect to transport. so you know we've been through a lot so i think we'll just identify that we're in this area of resurgence, these new oils are sort of distinct from the past oils, and in terms of oil demographics we're moving from this more


conventional side of the spectrum to a more unconventional spectrum. and again just how do we deal with that is the question at hand. so, i hope this is a picture of a cake and it is so thank you very much.


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