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Bishop Hill
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Reader Comments (34)
I expect our green lefty loons will move quickly to shut this down.
Mailman
Sweet!
Don't count your eggs but the BBC reported this 2 days ago "The company later claimed there could be up to 124 billion barrels of oil under the Weald Basin."
Todays press release is "steady early oil rate in excess of 463 barrels of oil per day over a further 7.3-hour period, in an approximate mix of over 99% oil and less than 1% water."
Oil price is volatile but an LT average $100/barrel thats $40K/day $14m+/yr so not yet billions
"Heavily regulated, more than a year to start getting production permits etc., so depends how enthusiastic the govt is"
Drill, baby, drill!!
Not very big, that rig. Bit like a regular building site.
Mailman
Too late. They're already there!
Can some one state how many "avg wind turbine days" = energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil ?
...Putin's Russian 'holiday' airline has just started organising Surrey walking tours for bored Russian ex-servicemen.
They expect higher flow rates from a horizontal well with standard reservoir stimulation techniques.
The full press release is here
A spit into a large leaky bucket.
No amount of oil will ever satisfy the car / credit nexus .....little auld Ireland is consuming 10kbd more diesel since the crash , less then 1 kbd is a sick Joke.
The 20th century inflationary consumer credit dream / nightmare is over.
However it will finish us before we see a end to its waste based consumption cycle.
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/americandream/b1.html
So, protesters again already camping on site - good communications links and not too far for a BBC journo / crew to visit regularly - we'll be seeing more of Horse Hill.... but not much of the encampment eh?
The BBC's "reporting" pongs as much as ever...
The berk brigade are ramping up demo activity - Caroline Lucas no doubt on site at some stage.
Re: stewgreen
100 barrels is about 170MWh or a wind turbine equivalent of 25MW
O/T stuff removed.
Eh 170MWh/day ? .... a 25MW turbine ops at 25% load factor
ie 6 hours per day = 150MWh per day so you meant 170MWh is per day
So with turbines usually about 2MW and not more than 6MW thats about 4 to 13 large turbines worth
So even this test field is a bigger producer than a large windfarm
(After new planning permission, a production well would come 1000 ft thru field horizontally and thus achieve flow rates of magnitudes more )
Cap the wells and leave it . Oil glut doesn't make it economic to continue. Sorry
However if Russian and Syrian forces go into NATO member Turkey chasing Syrian Rebels and IS and the price of oil starts to go back up then get back to it.
Re: stewgreen
Its pedantic I know but I meant 100 barrels of oil is equivalent to 170MWh
The per day production of the well is 100 barrels of oil.
Wind Turbine equivalent (MW) = (1.7*bpd/24)/0.28 = 25MW
Solar equivalent = (1.7*bpd/24)/0.1 = 71MW
bpd = barrels per day
@Jamspid
If it's economic then the company will extract it and we collect the tax, but I'd agree it's hard to see how this is going to be wildly profitable in the current climate. Unless the oil is *very* good and commands a premium.
Still, I'm sure the blob will do its very best to ensure it all stays in the ground. I'm sure Doug Parr is already preparing statements to tell us why living in the dark and cold will be essential for the survival of the planet. Carbon bubble etc. etc. Yawn.
Since fraccing is banned above 1000m TD they are limited to procedures that aren't described as fraccing. As was pointed out a while back, the legislation imposing the 1000m limit likely restricts fraccing to the North, where the strata are deeper.
Even shallower.
100 boe:
BP use 7.33 bbl/tonne, 12 MWh/toe, so 100 boe is 1200/7.33 or 163.7 MWh. 465 b/d is therefore over 30MW, or 10 turbines actually operating optimally, or the average output of 40 at good onshore sites.
If they think there is 124bn bbl OOIP with a 15% recovery rate, that's 18.6bn bbl, or 34 years' supply at 1.5 mb/d UK oil consumption.
I got sidetracked by stewgreen asking what the wind turbine equivalent was of 100 barrels per day. It is actually producing 463 bpd so the equivalents are:
Wind Turbines = 117MW
Solar = 327MW or about 4% of the entire UK photovoltaic installation or 32,000 solar installations.
It's a start, what we need to do is now, to shoot the green meanies - euphemism - natch.
Oil, coal and gas - the means to our future, the only problem with that is Corbyn and the full range of left wing SWP affiliates who would like Britain to become a third world disaster zone and or back in the dark ages.
You would have thought the Green Blobbies would have appreciated this energy supply in South East England. It will reduce the amount of French nuclear electricity being imported via Kent.
To those suggesting Hungry Horse is uneconomic: please review the production at nearby Palmer's Wood (just 12 miles away by the M25).
Note that most of it was at 20$/bbl prices in the 1990s, and despite the tiny volumes, they found it worthwhile to drill again in 2010 (producing a small uptick in production).
At HH they have two more strata they wish to test at shallower depths that might add more oil from the same well. As has been pointed out, production development would see the reservoir exploited through lateral drilling, radically increasing the production. Remember that the main test was through a 32/64ths inch choke. (Tradition in the oil industry is to quote the choke diameter in 64ths).
I appreciate comparisons of output with windmills (they are not "turbines") but does anyone have an approximate comparison for capital expenditure?
> does anyone have an approximate comparison for capital expenditure?
Look at the wholesale price for a comparison.
The current spot price is about £40/MWh or 4p/kWh. The feed in tariff for wind factories is 14p/kWH and, apparently, anything below this makes them uneconomic.
This means that conventional oil and gas, that has no guarantee that its output will be purchased, are profitable at 4p/kWh.
Wind factories, that have a guarantee all their output will be purchased, are just about profitable at 14p/kWh.
From this I'd conclude that wind costs at least 5x oil and gas.
Mike Spilligan
Maybe we could call them wind factories? They are most definitiely NOT windmills - they don't mill anything. I object to the use of the word "windmills", as it conjures up bucolic images of small-scale, architecturally attractive buildings which blend nicely and harmoniously into the landscape. Wind factories, or whatever is an accurate term for them, are anything but that.
For many decades, the US maintained a "Naval Petroleum Reserve" at Elk Hills. In 1995, the Clinton administration put Elk Hills reserve on the block, and it was sold off to Occidental Petroleum in 1998. I suspect someone will recommend establishment of a similar UK emergency reserve, based on the volatility of the MidEast and the current low price of oil. To be effective, however, investment in at least one field processing unit and one refinery would be necessary, so some gasoline production would result.
Mark H, 5:19 pm:
I think birdmashers or subsidy generators are more accurate terms. Wind factories implies they are doing something useful other than filling the pockets of their owners.
@ Fr. Jack Hackett
We already have one. Or we used to a few years ago. Up in the north west. People who worked on it had to sign official secret act. Dunno its current status
Now don't get me wrong but...........this find (above) is no real discovery, is it?
Without looking it up, going back in time to (moi) uni stratigraphy and petroleum Geology studies, the Kimmeridge clay formations have classic oil producing potential, Wytch Farm being the exemplar but the Jurassic North Sea OIL deposits are in similar formations - though, I stand to be corrected.
Athelstan, 6:15 pm:
Correct, from the OU's Earth's Natural Resources course, the North Sea deposits are in the same Kimmeridge Clay Formation - mudstone sequence with a Type II kerogen content.
Salopian at 5.44pm on 16th Feb.
You're quite right, I'm hoist on my own petard. They might not mill anything, but they're not useful enough to be called wind factories.
Subsidy generators it is, then. :-)
"Kimmeridge Clay Formation - mudstone sequence with a Type II kerogen content."
Indeed.
Ta for that Salopian.
This industry estimate suggests £1-2m per MW capital cost for wind. That is for peak nominal capacity of course, and doesn't include maintenance costs or costs for backup power, and almost certainly underestimates the costs of reinforcing the grid when peak wind becomes a significant share our generation.
I wonder why they no longer appear to be targetting the Triassic mentioned in the planning permission:
The initial target is located in the Portland Sandstone some 499 m below ground level (bgl), the secondary target is the Corallian Sandstone some 1143 m bgl and the third, the Triassic at approximately 2143 m depth. It is proposed to drill a deviated borehole which would reach its final target some 800 m north west of the above ground site. The initial geological target, the Portland Target, is relatively shallow and therefore the well deviation would not begin until close to the base of the Portland Sandstone at approximately 671 m. From that point the borehole would build angle, but to minimise the chance of difficulties with the wellbore, the build rate is programmed not to exceed 3.0o per 30.5 m up to a maximum angle of 22.6o.
Panic in the Greenery!