In recent years, the wave of publications devoted to the fight against global warming is becoming similar to a tsunami wave that swept all kinds of international conferences, and after them the vast majority of news and even analytical portals. Only the lazy does not write on this topic - the topic is in demand by readers and viewers "throughout the civilized world." The quotation marks are for the simple reason that they are diligently trying to convince us that global warming worries everyone, from small to large, in all countries, cities and towns. So diligently that a suspicion involuntarily creeps in - is it not repeating before our eyes a story similar to the one that already happened with "the harmful freon, which punches holes in the entire ozone layer of the planet, from which we will all die."
The fight against global warming has narrowed to loud demands for decarbonization of the energy sector, all other problems are fading into the background. There is no beast more terrible than carbon dioxide, and the furnaces of power plants that generate it! Therefore - down with any carbon, in any form, otherwise we will all drown, while suffocating from the lack of clean air, and we will do it at an incredible speed - most likely after the next rain on Thursday.
From a scientific approach - back to populism
Carbon, if someone suddenly forgot what this term means in Latin - just carbon, a chemical element denoted by the letter C. The fact that carbon is coal, this is graphite and diamonds, this is graphene and hydrocarbon fiber, we now hear quite often, but it is worth recalling that carbon is also the basis of any organic matter, that is, it is the basis of protein life on the third planet from the Sun. If we keep this in mind, then the term “decarbonization” ceases to be sympathetic, but the latent antipathy has more compelling reasons.
Recall that the predecessor of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement was the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, and this protocol was scientifically much more substantiated. The goal of the Kyoto agreement was to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases at a level that would not allow anthropogenic impact on the planet's climate system. Greenhouse gases in the plural, not just carbon dioxide, and the list of gases that could potentially lead to the global greenhouse effect was determined not by politicians, but by scientists. There are six such gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexatoride. Exaggerated attention exclusively to carbon dioxide has nothing to do with a scientific approach to the problem - you cannot pull out one component from a single set and say,that she is the root of all problems.
In recent years, liquefied natural gas, which is produced and consumed in an increasing number of countries, has become the most "fashionable" direction in the energy sector. We are assured that LNG is the most environmentally friendly, diverting attention from the fact that during its transportation and storage, the evaporation of methane is technologically inevitable, and methane is included in the "Kyoto list" along with carbon dioxide. We are assured that coal in the furnaces of power plants and boiler houses is an "infernal evil", diverting attention from the fact that the technology of its processing, the technology of its combustion can not only significantly reduce the harm to the environment, but also solve the economic problems of developing countries, in which the problem of the availability of electricity has not yet been resolved. Another "horror story" before our eyes is oil and its products - in order to get rid of harmful substances,formed as a result of the operation of internal combustion engines, we are offered to immediately switch the entire planet to electric vehicles. Not to develop the technology for cleaning motor fuel from harmful impurities, not to create new types of fuel, not to develop new types of filters, but to take, and even prohibit - this is how we are offered to understand the word "progress". To prohibit, not to admit, to close - this is how the highway to a shining world looks like, in which no one stole Greta Tumberg's childhood.to close - this is how the highway to a shining world looks like, in which no one stole Greta Tumberg's childhood.to close - this is how the highway to a shining world looks like, in which no one stole Greta Tumberg's childhood.
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Tellingly, the authors of this kind of texts type them by clicking the plastic keys of the keyboard, and this valuable information rushes along the wires, reliably covered with appropriate insulation, and many readers get access to it thanks to smartphones in elegant but durable plastic cases. The decarbonized world exists in close proximity to the world of Harry Potter and the planet of Narnia, and you and I live in a place where you cannot do without coal and hydrocarbons, where their use was the result of the development of a whole host of sciences - geology, materials science, inorganic and organic chemistry and many others. And there is simply no real reason to abandon their further application and development for the sake of fantasy fans, no matter how surprising it may sound.
We write "decarbonization", in mind we keep "Refusal of progress"
The mainstream western green movement urges us to abandon existing technologies without offering an adequate replacement, trying to put the cart in front of the horse. First - cost-effective technologies, and only then - attempts to disseminate them on a mass scale, otherwise nothing reasonable will come of it. If you want to develop exclusively "green technologies" for generating electricity from renewable energy sources - find a way to store this energy, and a cost-effective method on an industrial scale. But we are persistently imposed on the need for massive introduction of solar and wind generation in the "here and now" mode, immediately, quickly and even faster. To seriously believe that this is done solely out of love for nature? You can, of course, but for this you need to have an extreme degree of naivety.
Since 2014, the market for energy resources has become a market for buyers - after the fall in prices, not only the countries of the “golden billion” can acquire them, but also the countries, as they used to say, of the Third World. Potentially, this creates chances so that from the category of developing countries in Africa and Asia, they could quickly move to the category of developed ones, catching up with the states of the collective West. And it is for this reason that Europe and its allies impose on these countries a refusal from hydrocarbon and nuclear energy, urging them to develop only at the expense of renewable energy, from which the construction of hydroelectric power plants has also been "deleted". What can be the result of agreement with the notorious "world community"?
Solar and wind energy in the language of professionals is intermittent alternative generation, since neither one nor the other is fundamentally dispatchable. We do not know how to control cloudiness, the strength and direction of the wind, we do not have the technology for accumulating electricity on an industrial scale. Solar and wind power plants that do not rely on the foundation of traditional generation do not make it possible to create interconnected energy systems, do not make it possible to ensure a reliable supply of electricity. The consequence of this approach will inevitably be the inability to develop energy-intensive industries, namely, they provide the basic development of any developing economy. There is no reliable supply of energy - there is no opportunity to develop non-ferrous metallurgy, there is no opportunity to develop chemical production,there is no possibility to create enterprises of a continuous cycle.
If without "smart words", then here is the simplest example: tourists will not go to cities where there is no electricity at night, water supply and sewerage are not working. If they do not go, it means they will not bring money, will not provide sales for cafes, restaurants, and the flow of money in museums will not grow. They will not go where there is no way to get to historical or natural attractions other than by horse-drawn transport or in the presence of a good wind rose and sunny weather. Africa will develop exclusively renewable energy energy - these countries will continue to trade exclusively in minerals, exchanging the received currency for essential goods, and continue to remain “developing” as long as there is still population there.
What is presented as a frantic struggle for ecology and love for nature is just a new, previously unused way of unfair competition, nothing more. The next, no less logical conclusion: this can only be countered by the further development of technologies for processing and using traditional energy resources and their widest distribution. When supplying energy resources, Russian exporters should be able to offer the service as a package, as only Rosatom does now. If coal is offered, you need to be able to offer an ultra-supercritical pressure power plant, and fluidized bed boilers, and the latest thermal gas filtration systems, and technologies that allow the environmentally friendly and cost-effective processing of ash and slag.
Currently, only 42 countries use LNG - there are not enough regasification terminals, there are no pipelines leading from the coast inland, not all regions of the world have underground gas storage facilities, no power plants, and so on. Coal, gas, oil are competitive goods in all markets, and only in recent years Rosatom has signed fuel contracts until the end of the operating life of the Rooppur NPP in Bangladesh, the Belarusian NPP, Akkuyu NPP in Turkey and El-Dabaa in Egypt … The service life of NPPs based on VVER-1200 reactors is 60 years, during this time the nuclear corporation has a guaranteed sale of its nuclear fuel, has the ability to plan the activities and development of its mining and fuel divisions, and implement long-term logistic schemes. Against the background of Rosatom, our coal and gas companies are still at risk: at present, only GazpromEnergoholding has started implementing its first foreign project to build a power plant in Serbia, while domestic coal companies have nothing of the kind.
The sanctions of the collective West against Russia are not about Ukraine
The situation with oil looks even more complicated. Its share in the global energy balance in 2018 amounted to 32%, but in a number of countries there is active work to replace petroleum products as a motor fuel with liquefied carbon gas, compressed gas and LNG, and this trend is really capable of, it would seem, lead to reduce the importance of oil as an energy resource. However, the forecast given by OPEC in 2018 sounds different: according to the estimates of this organization, high demand from the petrochemical industry and due to the growth of motorization in developing countries, world oil demand by 2040 will grow by 14.5 million barrels per day, to 111, 7 million barrels. At the same time, oil produced by the OPEC countries by the same period will occupy a slightly larger share - it will grow from 34 to 36 percent. In order for oil-producing countries,non-OPEC members, including Russia, were able to retain their market shares, they have to prepare for a further increase in the share of hard-to-recover oil reserves, on average to 25%. The short conclusion is obvious - in the next 20 years Russia will have to fight for oil production, mastering new production technologies.
In other words, the industry, for objective reasons, will have to become more knowledge-intensive, master innovative and digital technologies. In the context of unilateral restrictive measures by the coalition led by the United States (recall that the use of the word "sanctions" is a deliberate substitution of concepts, in accordance with international law, only the UN Security Council has the right to make a decision on the use of sanctions), this means that the creation and the development of technologies for the extraction of hard-to-recover oil reserves, technologies for offshore and offshore production, oil production in the Arctic is increasingly on the agenda. If we are unable to solve both problems - maintaining and even increasing the production of energy resources while simultaneously creating our own projects for power plants of a new technological level,it is impossible to talk about any stable development of Russia.
The European Union, using the provisions of the Third Energy Package, is making every effort to ensure that the markets for energy resources remain buyers' markets, the increased volatility of world prices for oil and coal makes it impossible to plan revenues for the state budget of Russia. Here you can already hear the latent hum of voices:
The answer is arithmetically simple: only Rosneft transferred more than 4 trillion rubles in taxes to the Russian budget in 2018, the company paid another 112 billion rubles to the state in the form of dividends, and the average headcount of the company in 2018 was 308 thousand people. If we add to these numbers similar indicators for the rest of the oil companies, then the answer to emotional words becomes clear - the preservation and development of the oil industry is important and necessary for Russia. Strictly speaking, this fact does not depend on how our state system was called and is called - socialism or capitalism, and the export of crude oil began in the 60s of the last century.
You can't live without oil, no
But all these reflections are quite general, they will have a solid foundation only if we continue to expand our knowledge about the most important thing for our civilization - about energy resources. "Import substitution" is an interesting word that sounds beautiful, but to operate with it without understanding the meaning is the style of astrology and magic, the analytical online journal Geoenergetika.ru cannot afford this by definition. And we again run into a real paradox: in a country that is recognized by the whole world as one of the leaders in the gas and oil sectors, there is a minimum of knowledge about this industry among those who are not directly involved in it. We manage to call ourselves cultured people, living with the confidence that electricity is taken from the outlet, and oil - from underground reservoirs, which can be reached by energetically blowing a pipe into the ground,after which the aforementioned oil will gush out from there for several years and go by itself to any place we need.
With stories about the electrical component of power plants, about what kind of work and worries it costs the appearance of electricity for end consumers, we were once invaluable by the industry professional, Engineer with a capital letter Dmitry Talanov, thanks to whom a separate series of articles appeared in the Site Library. And just before the new year, 2020, we had a real festive surprise - to help you get acquainted with the oil industry, dear readers, agreed oil engineer Angelika Smirnova, a graduate of Russia's main “forge of human resources” in the oil and gas industry - the University. IM Gubkina, majoring in Oil and Gas Field Drilling.
Black gold planet
All articles about oil that appear in the media can be divided into two large classes - some talk about oil from the point of view of business, exchange trading and geopolitics, others are filled with professional terms that the authors do not even try to decipher.
“WTI quotes are falling, Brent is growing, Iranian tankers have disappeared into the fog, China is being supplied from Saudi Arabia, US shale oil is being delivered to Europe,” or something like “In the deep-water part of the paleobasin, the thickness of the Achimov deposits is decreasing due to the reduction of silty layers”. There is no "golden mean", and so I will try to find it - to tell what oil production really is and try to teach not to be afraid of the terminology used in the industry. And, yes - prepare in advance for the fact that you will have to part with a huge pile of all kinds of myths that have developed around oil. There are so many of these myths that even listing them will take several pages of text, so I will not record them one by one, only very “outstanding” ones. Let's start with the "childish" questions,the answers to which will be quite "mature".
What is oil?
Oil is a mineral, a flammable liquid of oily color, while there is no single chemical formula for oil, it can be radically different in composition, quality and even color. 90% of oil consists of hydrocarbons, and the remaining 10% contains up to a thousand different chemicals, the color of oil is influenced by the percentage of asphalt-resinous substances - the more there are, the darker the oil. There is even white oil, in which there is no asphaltenes at all, and the tar content is minimal - it is condensate with a large amount of gasoline. But this example is an exception to the rule, in order to obtain marketable oil from the hydrocarbons extracted from the ground, a number of complex technological measures are required - combined in oil refining.
How did the oil form?
The question is so "childish" that scientists still cannot give a definitive answer to it. The entire world oil community is divided into two unspoken camps: adherents of organic and inorganic theory. The essence of the dispute is simple - oil originated either from organic remains of animals and plants, or as a result of chemical processes of inorganic substances. Every geologist or oilman has chosen one of the theories for himself and lives in this paradigm. True, there is still a caste of undecided - who do not deny any of the theories. This dispute is extremely difficult to resolve - no one can say for sure about the processes taking place millions of years ago, both theories have many pros and cons. As a practical engineer, I prefer organic theory - it allows you to more accurately determine the location of deposits and deposits. Geological scientists can continue their disputes and disputes, and oil is needed every day and in decent quantities.
Where does oil live?
"Oil lakes underground" is the most common myth I've heard. They say that under the layers of rocks there is a certain lake of oil, which you just have to get to and that's it - a fountain like in cartoons and general rejoicing. But in reality, everything is completely different. The layers of rocks lie like the mattresses in The Princess and the Pea, one type of rock following another. Here is a typical example of the occurrence of rocks:
This, of course, is a fabulous story, but there are places on the planet where you can admire with the naked eye such "living illustrations":
Previously formed rocks were destroyed, or in the course of chemical reactions, sediment fell on the surface, or the products of weathering accumulated - as a result of all these processes, the accumulation of solid particles precipitated and, when immersed under the overlying layers, underwent significant transformations under the influence of high temperatures and pressure. As part of the introductory article, we will not go into the details of the formation of productive strata, but it is worth mentioning that most of the oily rocks are of sedimentary type in origin.
As a result, most often, the oil-containing reservoir is a collection of debris compressed under the pressure of the overlying strata - this is as simplified as possible, but it is quite enough for further understanding. There is a void space between the debris mentioned - oilmen call it pore space, and the voids themselves are simply pores, and it is in these pores that oil can be contained. The ratio of the pore space to the volume of the rock, expressed as a percentage, characterizes the ability of the rock to contain oil and gas and is called porosity, which, in turn, is divided into general and effective. About each in order. Pores in the reservoir can exist without communicating with each other in any way, the total porosity takes into account all pores without exception. Effective porosity takes into account only those poresalong which, hypothetically, the movement of oil and gas can occur. It is a big mistake to judge the ability of a reservoir to pass hydrocarbons through it in terms of porosity efficiency, since porosity is only a reservoir characteristic.
Filtration is characterized by a completely different parameter - permeability. Imagine a rock sample, for example the size of a brick, with a certain value of effective porosity, and now we mentally cut it and look at the section - the area of all pores in this section is the permeability, that is, the area of the pore space through which oil filtration can potentially occur and gas at differential pressure. This parameter is another reservoir characteristic, but here everything is much more complicated than with porosity. The permeability is influenced not only by the properties of the rock, but also by the properties of the oil and gas saturating it - for example, oil can be so viscous that even with high permeability with insignificant pressure drops, it will “refuse” to move along them. Conventional logic dictates which rocks have higher permeability, which ones are lower,no geological theory is required here. Well-permeable rocks - sand, sandstones, dolomites, dolomitized limestones and so on. Poorly permeable rocks - clays, shales, sandstones with argillaceous cementation and the like.
We have overcome as many as two oil terms, now you can enter the third one, which you probably met in non-core articles on our industry - the reservoir. There is nothing complicated here: an oil and gas reservoir is a rock that has not only sufficient porosity to contain hydrocarbons, but also permeability for their filtration.
But for the formation of an oil deposit, only a reservoir is not enough, by their nature oil and gas move upward and for their accumulation in one place a rock is needed that will hold them. This function is performed by rock, the permeability of which is close to zero, it is located above the reservoir and is called a seal, a rather colorful term. The collection of the reservoir, the oil and gas it contains, and the seals are called the oil and gas trap. Is it difficult to compare with something familiar? During the holiday season, you can afford an illustrative and widely known example in narrow circles: in order to get moonshine at home, you need a container with home brew and a very tightly fitted lid, otherwise you will not see luck.
Having figured out what a reservoir is and what rock properties are of primary importance for oilmen, it is worth considering in more detail in what form, in what state, oil, gas and water are located in the pore space of the reservoir. In nature, oil and gas cannot exist separately from each other, in the pores they are always in a state of a kind of "compote", which changes its properties depending on pressure. The main indicator in this case is the saturation pressure - this is the pressure below which gas begins to evolve from oil. For the same reason, under conditions when the pressure under which the hydrocarbons are located is higher than the saturation pressure, the gas is always dissolved in oil. And again a festive example: while a bottle of champagne is closed, we see only liquid in it,tearing off the wire - we get cotton due to the pressure of gas and a fountain over the table with dishes. Have you already mentally shuddered, imagining a Olivier filled with champagne? If you only knew how upset the oilmen are when they receive a gusher of oil from the well!.. However, we will definitely return to the story of this horror.
For simplicity, experts do not say that the reservoir contains oil and gas, or only oil, or only gas - we call the entire set of the produced product, including formation water, fluids.
Reservoir characteristics in real life
It was not for nothing that I started my first article with a detailed analysis of characteristics such as porosity and permeability. They are not only studied somewhere in the laboratory, but they really are of great importance in the analysis of the development object and in further production. In aggregate, porosity and permeability are called porosity and reservoir properties of the reservoir - abbreviated to reservoir properties. In reports and at conferences, this term constantly appears, for example, "the share of production from reservoirs with low reservoir properties this year amounted to so many percent of total production." Running a little ahead of myself, I will clarify that productive formations with critically low reservoir properties are one of the types of so-called hard-to-recover reserves, the very TREs that have been on everyone's lips lately.
Let's go directly to the numbers, to what parameters are used to assess how high or low reservoir properties of an oil reservoir. The unit of measurement of permeability is named after the French engineer Henri Darcy, who back in 1856 experimentally proved the dependence of fluid filtration through a porous medium on the pressure gradient. But let's not delve into the science of hydraulics, we will focus on what is directly related to oil production. Reservoir permeability, as already mentioned, is the area through which filtration passes; it is quite logical to measure it in square meters. The pore sizes are so small that the accepted standard 1 Darcy unit is 0,000,000,000,001 square meters, one thousand billionth of a square meter. It is worth noting here that a 1 Darcy reservoir is the ultimate dream for any oil worker. In life, one has to deal with values on average 40 - 80 mD (milliDarcy, ten to minus three), and the permeability of the sensational Bazhenov formation, according to various estimates, varies within 0.001 - 0.5 mD.
With porosity it is still clearer - it is simply indicated as a percentage. Currently, sandstones with a porosity value of 20-30% are considered to be good reservoirs, reservoirs with higher values were seen only by pioneer oilmen in the middle of the last century.
We got acquainted in some detail with the most basic concepts that oilmen operate with, at the same time parting with a number of myths and fairy tales. It may be that the introductory article seemed a little dry, but there is no other way to get close to the stories about what is happening in oil deposits and fields than we, oilmen, generally do in our oil fields. We have already conquered the basis for new stories, we will continue to act as we were taught - we will deepen.
The article was prepared in collaboration with Boris Martsinkevich.
Author: ANGELIKA SMIRNOVA