| |
|
Oil and Money
|
4/16/1999, Wall Street Journal
Odd Reservoir Off
Louisiana Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning
By
CHRISTOPHER COOPER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL
HOUSTON -- Something mysterious is going on at
Eugene Island 330.
Production at the oil field, deep in
the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, was supposed to
have declined years ago. And for a while, it behaved like any
normal field: Following its 1973 discovery, Eugene Island
330's output peaked at about 15,000 barrels a day. By 1989,
production had slowed to about 4,000 barrels a
day.
Then suddenly -- some say almost inexplicably --
Eugene Island's fortunes reversed. The field, operated by
PennzEnergy Co., is now producing 13,000 barrels a day, and
probable reserves have rocketed to more than 400 million
barrels from 60 million. Stranger still, scientists studying
the field say the crude coming out of the pipe is of a
geological age quite different from the oil that gushed 10
years ago.
Fill 'er Up
All of which has led some
scientists to a radical theory: Eugene Island is rapidly
refilling itself, perhaps from some continuous source miles
below the Earth's surface. That, they say, raises the
tantalizing possibility that oil may not be the limited
resource it is assumed to be.
"It kind of blew me
away," says Jean Whelan, a geochemist and senior researcher
from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in
Massachusetts. Connected to Woods Hole since 1973, Dr. Whelan
says she considered herself a traditional thinker until she
encountered the phenomenon in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, she
says, "I believe there is a huge system of oil just migrating"
deep underground.
Conventional wisdom says the world's
supply of oil is finite, and that it was deposited in
horizontal reservoirs near the surface in a process that took
millions of years. Since the economies of entire countries
ride on the fundamental notion that oil reserves are
exhaustible, any contrary evidence "would change the way
people see the game, turn the world view upside down," says
Daniel Yergin, a petroleum futurist and industry consultant in
Cambridge, Mass. "Oil and renewable resource are not words
that often appear in the same sentence."
Mideast
Mystery
Doomsayers to the contrary, the world contains
far more recoverable oil than was believed even 20 years ago.
Between 1976 and 1996, estimated global oil reserves grew 72%,
to 1.04 trillion barrels. Much of that growth came in the past
10 years, with the introduction of computers to the oil patch,
which made drilling for oil more predictable.
Still,
most geologists are hard-pressed to explain why the world's
greatest oil pool, the Middle East, has more than doubled its
reserves in the past 20 years, despite half a century of
intense exploitation and relatively few new discoveries. It
would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs and prehistoric
plants to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil
in the region, notes Norman Hyne, a professor at the
University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. "Off-the-wall theories often
turn out to be right," he says.
Even some of the most
staid U.S. oil companies find the Eugene Island discoveries
intriguing. "These reservoirs are refilling with oil,"
acknowledges David Sibley, a Chevron Corp. geologist who has
monitored the work at Eugene Island.
Mr. Sibley
cautions, however, that much research remains to be done on
the source of that oil. "At this point, it's not black and
white. It's gray," he says.
Although the world has been
drilling for oil for generations, little is known about the
nature of the resource or the underground activities that led
to its creation. And because even conservative estimates say
known oil reserves will last 40 years or more, most big oil
companies haven't concerned themselves much with hunting for
deep sources like the reservoirs scientists believe may exist
under Eugene Island.
Economics never hindered the
theorists, however. One, Thomas Gold, a respected astronomer
and professor emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.,
has held for years that oil is actually a renewable,
primordial syrup continually manufactured by the Earth under
ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this
substance migrates toward the surface, it is attacked by
bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating
back to the dinosaurs, he says.
While many scientists
discount Prof. Gold's theory as unproved, "it made a believer
out of me," says Robert Hefner, chairman of Seven Seas
Petroleum Inc., a Houston firm that specializes in ultradeep
drilling and has worked with the professor on his experiments.
Seven Seas continues to use "conventional" methods in seeking
reserves, though the halls of the company often ring with
dissent. "My boss and I yell at each other all the time about
these theories," says Russ Cunningham, a geologist and
exploration manager for Seven Seas who isn't sold on Prof.
Gold's ideas.
Energy Vacuum
Knowing that clever
theories don't fill the gas tank, Roger Anderson, an
oceanographer and executive director of Columbia University's
Energy Research Center in New York, proposed studying the
behavior of oil in a reservoir in hopes of finding a new way
to help companies vacuum up what their drilling was leaving
behind.
He focused on Eugene Island, a kidney-shaped
subsurface mountain that slopes steeply into the Gulf depths.
About 80 miles off the Louisiana coast, the underwater
landscape surrounding Eugene Island is otherworldly, cut with
deep fissures and faults that spontaneously belch gas and oil.
In 1985, as he stood on the deck of a shrimp boat towing an
oil-sniffing contraption through the area, Dr. Anderson
pondered Eugene Island's strange history. "Migrating oil and
anomalous production. I sort of linked the two ideas
together," he says.
Five years later, the U.S.
Department of Energy ponied up $10 million to investigate the
Eugene Island geologic formation, and especially the oddly
behaving field at its crest. A consortium of companies leasing
chunks of the formation, including such giants as Chevron,
Exxon Corp. and Texaco Corp., matched the federal
grant.
Time and Space
The Eugene Island
researchers began their investigation about the same time that
3-D seismic technology was introduced to the oil business,
allowing geologists to see promising reservoirs as a cavern in
the ground rather than as a line on a piece of
paper.
Taking the technology one step further, Dr.
Anderson used a powerful computer to stack 3-D images of
Eugene Island on top of one another. That resulted in a 4-D
image, showing not only the reservoir in three spatial
dimensions, but showing also the movement of its contents over
time as PennzEnergy siphoned out oil.
What Dr. Anderson
noticed as he played his time-lapse model was how much oil
PennzEnergy had missed over the years. The remaining crude,
surrounded by water and wobbling like giant globs of Jell-O in
the computer model, gave PennzEnergy new targets as it
reworked Eugene Island.
What captivated scientists,
though, was a deep fault in the bottom corner of the computer
scan that was gushing oil like a garden hose. "We could see
the stream," Dr. Anderson says. "It wasn't even debated that
it was happening."
Woods Hole's Dr. Whelan, invited by
Dr. Anderson to join the Eugene Island investigation,
postulated that superheated methane gas -- a compound that is
able to absorb vast amounts of oil -- was carrying crude from
a deep source below. The age of the crude pushed through the
stream, and its hotter temperature helped support that theory.
The scientists decided to drill into the fault.
Unlucky
Strike
As prospectors, the scientists were fairly
lucky. As researchers they weren't. The first well they
drilled hit natural gas, a pocket so pressurized "that it
scared us," Dr. Anderson says; that well is still producing.
The second stab, however, collapsed the fault. "Some oil
flowed. I have 15 gallons of it in my closet," Dr. Anderson
says. But it wasn't successful enough to advance Dr. Whelan's
theory.
A third well was drilled at a spot on an
adjacent lease, where the fault disappeared from seismic view.
The researchers missed the stream but hit a fair-size
reservoir, one that is still producing.
It was here, in
1995, that the scientists ran out of grant money and
PennzEnergy lost interest in continuing. "I'm not discounting
the possibility that there is oil moving into these
reservoirs," says William Van Wie, a PennzEnergy senior vice
president. "I question only the rate."
Dr. Whelan
hasn't lost interest, however, and is seeking to investigate
further the mysterious vents and seeps. While industry
geologists have generally assumed such eruptions are merely
cracks in a shallow oil reservoir, they aren't sure. Noting
that many of the seeps are occurring in deep water, rather
than in the relative shallows of the continental shelf, Dr.
Whelan wonders if they may link a deeper source.
This
summer, a tiny submarine chartered by a Louisiana State
University researcher will attempt to install a series of
measuring devices on vents near the Eugene Island property.
Dr. Whelan hopes this will give her some idea of how quickly
Eugene Island is refilling. "We need to know if we're talking
years or if we're talking hundreds of thousands of years," she
says.
URL for this
Article:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB924151147795357823.djm
Copyright
� 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
|
|
|
