Introduction to Petroleum Production 1

Introduction

Petroleum materials and the petroleum production industry had played a crucial role in modern world history and economic development. Petroleum and its derivative products remain one of the most important material on earth with applications in almost all works of life. Petroleum is number one choice of clean fuel for the past 50 years providing fuel energy for humanity and our industries.The derived petrochemicals had been applied in developing a vast array of products that is being utilized and consumed in almost all industrial sectors and all works of life from the food production industry to the industrial machine/materials manufacturing and transportation industry.

Yet deliberate access to geologic formations bearing petroleum through drilled wells is relatively recent. The first commercial oil well drilled in world history is the the Drake well drilled in 1859 in Pennsylvania USA. Oil and gas exploration and production activities was dominated by the Americans till around 1930 when exploration activities started happening in other parts of the world like in the Middle east, Africa and Europe. Though United States of America remain the largest producer and importer of petroleum products, USA is also the largest consumer of petroleum products. When it comes to petroleum production activities, the rigs are being erected in other parts of the world to produce oil and gas. Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Angola, Libya, Russia are just few of the countries outside the USA that are oil and gas production majors.      

As oil and gas well drilling moves from onshore environments to harsh offshore and polar ice cap environments, the cost of oil and gas well construction gets higher. It is also more economical and less risky to drill oil and gas wells in matured developed fields with known geological and production information than constructing petroleum wells in wild cat exploration areas where we may not have enough information to predict petroleum reservoir performance hence the uncertainty of encountering oil and gas in commercial quantity in the target reservoir. 

Jackup Offshore Drilling Platform

Petroleum exploration and production is an expensive art and experts work hard to eliminate and mitigate all risk associated with oil and gas exploration and production. An average well may cost about $30 million to $60 million to construct. The world spends about $100 billion annually to construct oil and gas wells. 

PETROLEUM FLUID

Petroleum is a mixture of hydrocarbons consisting of about 13% by weight of hydrogen and 87% of carbon.

Crude petroleum may include several hundred components combined chemically comprising of open chain and cyclic hydrocarbons of single, double or triple bonds. 

Crude oil mixture is no longer described based on its composition except in cases where we distinguish it based on important generic distinguishing contents(paraffinic and alsphaltenic crude). Today, petroleum is characterized based on the density and viscosity of the fluid at a given temperature and pressure. 

The thermodynamic and phase behavior of petroleum had been used to distinguish it into liquid(oil) and natural gas. Given specific temperature and pressure, crude oil can be described as volume/density at some standard conditions for instance 60F temperature and atmospheric pressure.