Tough-Oil and Hydrogen-Sulphide

August 31, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

“Tough” Oil and Hydrogen-Sulphide.

By folc.ca

According to oil-industry experts and analysts, we are beginning to enter the second half of the history of oil exploration — not as far as time goes but with respect to the volumes of recoverable oil. It is ever more difficult and expensive — even politically and financially risky — to find and explore oil reserves now.

Oil from the Alberta tar-sands is expensive to mine and contains between 4.5 percent to 7 percent sulphur, while oil in Kazakhstan is as deep as 5,000 metres or more and contains easily up to 19 percent hydrogen-sulphide at enormous pressures.

To sell the massive and escalating volumes of the waste sulphur recovered from oil and gas into a “supply-glutted” world market is so tough that the oil companies would do it at just about any price - give it away and even give money to boot, if they only could find someone who will take it off their hands. The sulphur removed from oil or natural gas needs to be stored somewhere, a good portion of it quite likely at our backdoor, less than just two miles east of Bruderheim, Alberta.

To get that Kazakhstan oil to market is another issue, fraught with geo-political complications.

The experts agree that world oil output will begin to decline by about 2012. However, a country self-sufficient in energy sources may have to think about how it will stay also independent. That is something that for some countries has already proven itself to be a hard thing to do.

On Tap: The Tough-Oil Era

There is, however, a second aspect to peak-oil theory, which is no less relevant when it comes to the global-supply picture — one that is far easier to detect and assess today. Peak-oil theorists have long contended that the first half of the world’s oil to be extracted and consumed will be the easy half. They are referring, of course, to the oil that’s found on shore or near to shore; oil close to the surface and concentrated in large reservoirs; oil produced in friendly, safe, and welcoming places.

The other half — what (if they are right) is left of the world’s petroleum supply — is the tough oil. They mean oil that’s buried far offshore or deep underground; oil scattered in small, hard-to-find reservoirs; oil that must be obtained from unfriendly, politically dangerous, or hazardous places. An oil investor’s eye-view of our energy planet today quickly reveals that we already seem to be entering the tough-oil era. This explains the growing pessimism among industry analysts as well as certain changes in behavior in the energy marketplace….(Full Story)

“Tough” oil is oil that may cause wars to be fought, more easily now than in the preceding “easy” oil era. Some writers have something to say about that, too.

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