The problem with alternative energy sources now is that oil is too cheap.

He says no taxes on oil. I disagree. There are already huge profits in producing oil. I don't believe private industry can be trusted to make the changes we need to make.

I say tax the oil until other technologies can compete and use all the revenue to create more efficent systems like the rail system he advocates, alternative energy sources etc.

We must do this now. Once the oil is gone, it will be too late.

Don you say "The problem with alternative energy sources now is that oil is too cheap."  Simmons' point is, that is soon to be history.  

He makes the very cogent point that an oil tax would be counterproductive today.  It would detract from the political will to confront the real problems. A new idea, to me, and I agree!

Thank you for conducting and posting this interview.

He said: "There are lots of ways to spend the money generated from oil. We might just have to actually have some tax policies because what we cannot tolerate is the owners of the oil just putting it in their pockets and getting even more utterly wealthy."

I know there's a lot of material dealing with how enhanced recovery techniques can cause production for a field to collapse (can't say that I know much about it, but I know that much), but what's the mechanism by which reduced pumping causes fields to remain viable longer? [I'm presuming that this longevity is in excess of simple consumption (i.e., it's not a question of 50K bbld over twice as long as 100K bbld).] Is it simply a matter of oil flow within the reservoir, as determined by the permeability of the geology? Sorry to be a pain, but having tried googling this one, it's clear that I don't know enought about the issue to frame an effective search.

Thanks for a very interesting interview, BTW.

Sean - a really fine job on the interview - you kept it away from politics and so did he, and that makes a real difference

I didn't see Oil Storm on Fox, but from what I heard it was like Independence Day without the aliens.  We (as a country) are not going to even get serious on this until we get past the head-in-the-ground mentality, and listening to Simmons is a start.

Now if only he got some coverage - oops, I think the Jackson jury is breaking for lunch - gotta go.

Sean-Paul

A very informative interview.  Just another data point on my list of reasons for following this site.  I passed on to the EnergyBulletin website a pointer to the post and they put a comment and link to it in their news summary.  Good stuff.  Badly needed.

I don't think a big push for intermodal freight is quite the panacea pictured by Mr. Simmons. The average length of haul in the trucking industry has been on the decline for some time now. Right now its in the ballpark of 200 miles for truckload carriers.  By the time the shipment is routed to and from the rail connections most of the fuel savings are lost.

Also Truck Traffic congestion in the cities might get worse. Intead of the truck routing from outside the metro area directly to the delivery point, the truck travels through town to the rail yard then from the rail yard back through town to the destination. The once it is unloaded the empty container will be loaded (hopefully near where it was unloaded) and travel again through town to the rail. Moving to a greater Intermodal bias in long distance freight might help some corridors but the main improvement would be on Interstates between towns rather than in urban areas where congestion is the fuel economy killer.

There is definitely room for improvement. Right now much of the container freight flowing from California to the Notheast has to make a rubber tire movement from one railyard to another in Chicago. Intermodal today is strongest on a few routes where the rail has a very stong presence. The rails will not only need to add capacity, but also improve their ability to track and handle freight (transit times are getting better but the trailers often are damaged by the rail, OK for paper rolls, not OK for high value cargo).

but also will create even much greater profits than now exist.

And the profits are huge right now. So big in fact, that those with oil will soon own everything.

By one fashion or another, a portion of this wealth needs to be earmarked for changes we need to make and there is no private company in the world with the resources or the will to make these changes.

Right now gas costs about $6 a gallon in most of Europe. We get it for $2. I think a dollar a gallon is appropriate with the requirement that every dime go to alternative energy or more efficient uses of what we now have. We all will benefit in the long run.

We can get by now without it, but we are selling our children's futures.

Pay now, or pay later.

Oh well.

From my limited experience with oil, but I do know a little, reducing the production keeps the pressure in the well relatively high so the oil comes out naturally as opposed to injecting water to create artficial pressure.

You've seen the old photos of spindletop and what not. They're gushers because of the pressure in the well. As the production inxcreases and you pull more oil out of the well the pressure decreases makuing it harder to get the oil out.

Does this help?

I'm glad you liked the interview. It was fun and I learned quite a bit myself. He was really fun to interview and it is a shame I cannot include the tone with which he spoke. He's got an oilmans sardonic wit that just doesn't come through real well on paper, er, bytes, that is.

are under pressure. If this pressure is released too fast, then the driving mechanism is lost. Horizontal wells can be useful for a time, but even they require some pressure to get the oil to move to the bore hole so it can be extracted.

By bleeding the field slowly and maintaining the pressure in the formation, a more efficient movement of the oil results.

This mass bleeding was done in the Austin Chalk around the nearby town of Luling, Texas. They punched holes every few feet and let them rip. It is estimated that a large per-centage of the oil is still in the ground there, (I've heard numbers like 85%), but cannot be be retrieved without spending a barrel's worth of energy (or close to it) to remove a barrel of oil.

I'm not an oil expert but I did once do a paper on "produced water", a technical term for all the other stuff that comes up with oil, plus I'm from one of them filthy rich oil nations, which means I have fairly solid general background knowledge on oil.

As others posted, oil fields need to be pressurised to produce oil, otherwise the oil wont flow up the drill hole. Obviously, when you produce oil, you reduce the pressure, and the trick is to maintain pressure for as long as possible. But it's also very important exactly what you're pumping up.

A typical oil field is in porous rock under a layer of dense rock shaped like an upside down U. Gas (propane,etc) collect at the top of the reservoir, then underneath comes the oil, then comes water. That is all due to gravity, lighter elements on top.

When you drill, you try to extract the oil first, if you take the gas(i.e. propane, etc) first you loose pressure to quick and the oil may become unrecoverable. So you drill through/past the gas layer into the oil layer. (and do the gas once the oil is mostly gone)

In the beginning, you produce very pure oil (say 90%). But as an oil field grows old, you pump up more and more water (which isn't actually only water, but also a lot of nasty stuff, like uranium, reservoir chemicals, heavy metals, micro oil droplets, etc). A mature field can easily produce 10% oil and the rest produced water. Produced water is of course expensive to pump, expensive to separate, reduces pressure just as much as oil, is very bad for the environment (it's usually quite radioactive), and can normally not be reinjected into the well (it is not a clean fluid and will normally clog up things)

If you produce an oil field to fast, you will create large pressure differences within the reservoir, and reduce the natural "sorting" of gravity and pressure. Thus, rather than having inflow of oil from the side, you may end up sucking water from below, or just mixing up the oil and water to much. It also takes a lot of time for oil to be "washed out" of porous rock (and be replaced by water). Pump to quickly, and you end up replacing the oil in the "veins and arteries" of the rock with water, but much of the oil locked in finely porous rock will remain, locked in because it can't easily escape into the now water- filled "veins and arteries".

Worst, however, are problems caused by injection drilling. Injection will help rebuild pressure and keep the flow high, but injected liquid will eventually find it's way into the pumped oil itself, and once you start injecting you'll find that you get an ever-increasing part of injection liquid in your well production. Plus, the increased pressure will help mix up water and oil, plus it will also push a lot of oil AWAY from the well/into more pourous rock rather than out of the rock and towards the well.

OK, hope that wasn't to boring and maybe even helped answer your question a bit (and don't forget I'm not an oil engineer)    

although our answers aren't much different. thanks Don!

glad you liked it and stick around. There is lots of good stuff here and lots and lots of great people!

What you have described might be the case in one area and not in another.

The earth is layered and each formation has unique properties. My dad is a geologist and has devoted his life to the study of this and still learns new things as time goes on. Like you, I don't know a hell of a lot about it.

But as a general rule, oil in my part of the world is trapped in porous rock, (but not always) and is retrievable only near fault lines where the structures have been fractured.

Exceptions include serpentine plugs and seas of oil contained in sands like those of Saudi Arabia.

A myriad of problems await those that try to extract the stuff from the ground.

The pressure you speak of is not necessary needed only to get the oil up the bore hole, it is necessary to move the oil through the formation and to the bore hole.

Some formations (clays) will swell with the presence of water and seal off the oil.

You may ruin one zone by allowing the fluid from another to comingle with another, or one zone may rob the pressure or the fluid from another. Remember that you are working thousands of feet below the surface through a tiny hole and there are lots of surprises waiting.

Corrosive chemicals eat the pipe and equipment. Holes develop. Maybe something another person does miles away destroys your well.

Many potentially productive fields have been ruined by poor or misguided management and may be lost forever.  

For years all the gas was and still is vented off in wells. Shortsideness--people either not understanding or not caring--just wanting to get what they could as fast as they could without conisidering future consequences are at fault. Or the ignorant (which includes all of us to a degree).

And now people like this run the country.