Each of these different deposits requires a different

production technology. The easiest is when you

have a nice accumulation, and this accumulation is under a cap rock
and it is on-shore. This is what we find in
many parts of the world, but especially in
the Middle East. In places like Saudi Arabia,
Abu Dhabi, Kuwait. There, you have
huge accumulations of oil and it's very
easy to produce it. All you need to do
is to drill a well, perforate the cap rock, and then you reach the level
where oil is contained. Because oil down there is
under pressure and it is hot, it will come out spontaneously. So in the past when
people
were drilling wells, they were reaching
a deposit of oil, they were very happy and you had what they call at
the time a gusher, an oil well that had
a fountain of oil coming out, and you can see a picture
that looked for, it's a picture from
the 19 twenties. This is the field of Baba Gurgur, which is the first major
discovery in Iraq. Look at the way in which the oil comes out
like a fountain, and people would be very happy. You can see perhaps a
little river coming from the well and that
river is a river of oil, and in other cases
that have been leaks of oil created by
this phenomenon. Today we would call this
an environmental disaster. At the time, they
were very happy. Today we call this a
blowout and we want to avoid at all
conditions blowout, we want to make sure
that there is no oil that escapes into
the environment. That we control every drop of oil that comes
out of the well. When it comes to deep offshore, if instead of operating
on the ground, we are operating at sea, then the matter becomes
more complicated. If we are deep offshore
where we cannot have a platform with legs that reach
to the bottom of the sea, then we need to use a ship. These are very special ships,
you see an image of
a ship of this kind, which are capable
with propellers. They have generally at
least six propellers that can be directed in
all directions so that the ship is capable
of sitting immobile on top of the place where
they want to drill the well, and this is out in the ocean
where there are hurricanes, where the sea can be very bad, and it's very
difficult to operate, and yet we are capable
of keeping a ship absolutely steady on top of a well and drill in this well. So
imagine you have 3,000 meters of tubes
going through the water, then reaching the bottom, then starting drilling
and going further another maybe 3,4,5,
or 6,000 meters. It's a very complex technology. It's a very difficult thing. The
opposite case is when we
have oil that has not found a cap rock and comes to the ground or very
close to the ground. That is the situation
with tar sands in Canada. Then you use methods
like strip mining. The oil is basically solid. It's mixed with sand and
you have to scoop it up and then wash it in order to separate
the sand from the oil. You do that with a lot of
water, generally hot water. Because the hot water
facilitates the process of separating the oil from the sand. Of course, that is an
expensive
and challenging process. But the challenge is
entirely different from producing oil in
the deep offshore. Finally, we have
something that has become better-known recently
because there is a boom of that in
the United States, and that is shale oil. Shale oil is oil
which has formed in the crust of the earth but has being trapped in a
rock which is not porous, and it cannot flow
away from this rock. So if you just drill a
conventional well in this rock, there will be
very little oil going into the hole that
you have drilled. So in order to increase the production and make this
meaningful and profitable, you have to fracture the
rock around the well, around the hole that is well. So that when you fracture it,
there are veins that open in the rock and
through these veins, the oil which is trapped in the rock can flow into the well,
and will come to the surface. This is what we call hydraulic
fracturing or fracking, which is a very controversial, has become a very
controversial
technology or technique. Although, it has been in
use for many many years, and it has been in use much before even for
conventional oil deposit, much before the
recent developments. But the scale at
which it's being used these days is without precedent. So in order to exploit
a shale oil deposit, you need to drill a well. We have learned how to drill
horizontally in the ground. Vertically first, then we reach the level where
the oil is contained, and we continue horizontally. This allows us to
have a well that has a large surface of contact
with the oil reservoir. Because you have to
keep in mind that the oil reservoir
is not very thick. Maybe you are drilling 4
or 5,000 meters below, at least 3,000 meters below. You may have a few meters
of oil baring rock or up to a few thousand meters
in the major fields. In the Middle East, you may
have 100 to 100 meters. But it's not a huge thickness. So in order to
increase the contact, you have to drill
horizontally into the formation so that more oil comes out of a single well. In the
next unit, we have selected
a few short videos to illustrate these
different methods, and this will be more clear
than I can tell you in words. I hope that you will find
them clear and instructive. The important thing,
remember the following. Drilling a well is
always a risky matter. You never know what
you will find. So it's risky because
it's expensive. It's risky because when
you come to the end of it and you have
reached your target, the formation that you had seen with your
exploration techniques, you may find out that
there is nothing there. Maybe just contains water. There is no oil. Maybe
it contains gas, which is much less valuable. So there is a significant
economic risk. At the same time, there is an environmental risk. Because if the job
is
not done properly, a lot of damage can be made. If the job is done properly, then
we know how to avoid damage. In theory, a well drilled well is not going to
cause any damage. But this is the theory and
then there is practice, and sometimes practice is
not in line with the theory.