Petroleum Holdings biology
LS9, a high-tech fuel company that’s all about imitating nature, has received $5 million in funding, as the search to derive alternatives to fossil fuels through plants and microbes gains momentum.
The company hopes to make what it calls “renewable petroleum,” a synthetic version of petroleum and other oil-based industrial products. (It has trademarked the name.)
Synthetic petroleum can provide more energy, per gallon, than ethanol, advocates say, and it can power the wide mass of cars on the road today. It also will result in less carbon dioxide emissions overall than regular gas dug from the ground.
Some start-ups, such as Solazyme and LiveFuels, have announced plans to produce synthetic petroleum from algae. Fields of algae will absorb carbon dioxide and other compounds and metabolize it into petroleum, the companies said.
By contrast, LS9 said it will brew petroleum through synthetic biology, laboratory and industrial processes that can perform the same function as algae or microbes. As a result, production doesn’t rely on live, single-celled creatures. Ideally, this will make the manufacturing process more amenable to performance enhancement or control. In a sense, LS9 will make imitation petroleum with imitation animals.
The company’s efforts are largely based on research conducted by Chris Somerville, director of the Carnegie Institution and professor of plant biology at Stanford University, and George Church, the director of the MIT-Harvard U.S. Department of Energy GTL (Gas to Liquids) Center and professor of genetics at Harvard University. Khosla Ventures is the principal investor, and Khosla Venture partner Doug Cameron is the acting CEO.
In a relatively short time, the Khosla firm has formed something of a microbe mafia by investing in a wide variety of companies that concentrate on harnessing the power of synthetic or real biology. The firm has invested in Gevo, a company spun out of the California Institute of Technology that hopes to develop ethanol production processes by imitating the metabolic processes of termites. Khosla is also one of the primary investors in Mascoma, which is building a plant in New York state to turn leftover farm products and other vegetable matter into ethanol with microbes.
Additionally, the firm had an investment in Celunol, which was bought by Diversa, a maker of industrial enzymes founded by Caltech professor Mel Simon. Simon has touted the termite ideas being developed at Gevo.
Pipeline diplomacy petroleum
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline was built to transport crude oil and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum pipeline (South Caucasus Pipeline) was built to transport natural gas from the western side of the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea bypassing Russian pipelines and thus Russian control. Following the construction of the pipelines the United States and the European Union proposed extending them by means of the proposed Trans-Caspian Oil Pipeline and the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline under the Caspian Sea to oil and gas fields on the eastern side of the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. In 2007, Russia signed agreements with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to connect their oil and gas fields to the Russian pipeline system effectively killing the undersea route.
China has completed the Kazakhstan-China oil pipeline from the Kazakhstan oil fields to the Chinese Alashankou-Dushanzi Crude Oil Pipeline in China. China is also working on the Kazakhstan-China gas pipeline from the Kazakhstan gas fields to the Chinese West-East Gas Pipeline in China.
Petroleum positics holdings US
In 1956, a Shell geophysicist named M. King Hubbert accurately predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970.[1]
Matthew Simmons, an energy investment banker and a former adviser to US president George W. Bush believes that oil production in Saudi Arabia will soon peak, meaning it will not be able to supply the world’s growing energy needs.
In June of 2006, former U.S. president Bill Clinton said in a speech,[2]
“We may be at a point of peak oil production. You may see $100 a barrel oil in the next two or three years, but what still is driving this globalization is the idea that is you cannot possibly get rich, stay rich and get richer if you don’t release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That was true in the industrial era; it is simply factually not true. What is true is that the old energy economy is well organized, financed and connected politically.”
In a 1999 speech, Dick Cheney, the US Vice President and former CEO of Halliburton (one of the world’s largest energy services corporations), said,
“By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?….While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow.”[3]
Cheney went on to argue that the oil industry should become more active in politics:
” Oil is the only large industry whose leverage has not been all that effective in the political arena. Textiles, electronics, agriculture all seem often to be more influential. Our constituency is not only oilmen from Louisiana and Texas, but software writers in Massachusetts and specially steel producers in Pennsylvania. I am struck that this industry is so strong technically and financially yet not as politically successful or influential as are often smaller industries. We need to earn credibility to have our views heard.”
Bissonet Humble Petroleum
Bissonet Lease at Humble Salt Dome Field
History
Humble Salt Dome Field was discovered in the early 1900’s. Bubbles of oil were first observed seeping from the ground near the San Jacinto river in 1887. Humble became an oil boomtown in the early 1900’s when oil was first produced here. The first oil was produced a couple years earlier after the famous Spindletop discovery in Beaumont Texas.
In the fall of 1902, George Hart spudded a well in the field on evidence of escaping gas in the area. His operation was halted by a blowout, an unexpected volume of gas under pressure, that forced the drilling equipment out of the hole. Blowouts were encountered in several wells in the part of the field later called “the hill” and drilled in the summer of 1904 by C.E. Barrett of Houston. Despite the menace of blowouts, some success was found in the early field when Higgins Oil and Fuel Company brought in a large-volume gas well half a mile Southeast of Barrett wells in October 1904. By the end of the year, Humble field reported two sporadically-producing oil wells that had yielded 2,000 barrels of oil. Since none of the crude had been sold, it was stored in earthen tanks for use in the field. Even though blowouts hampered field development, their threat was minimized by the invention of a blowout preventer in 1905. D.R. Beatty used the blowout preventer on the #2 Fee Well which gave up the first gusher with a potential of 8,500 barrels of oil a day from a depth of 1,012 feet.
From 1905 through 1913, development of the field concentrated on the caprock of the salt dome, producing at depths of 1,100 – 1,200 ft. When deep production was found on the dome flanks at Sour Lake Field, operators in Humble field drilled into zones below 2,500 ft., hoping to emulate the success at Sour Lake. In November 1913 the effort was rewarded when Producers Oil #11 Carroll cam in with a potential 10,000 barrels of oil per day at a total depth of 2,700 ft. Forty-six wells were completed before the end of the year, and production reached nearly 2.8 million barrels of oil. In 1935 the Wilson Oil House Well #1 came in at 1500 bopd from the 2,500 ft. sand on the north flank of the field.
Geological estimation of total reserves: 50,000,000 barrels of oil.
Estimated Payout: somewhere between 100 – 300 barrels of crude oil per day.
Science of Oil
Most geologists view crude oil, like coal and natural gas, as the product of compression and heating of ancient organic materials over geological time scales. According to this theory, it is formed from the decayed remains of prehistoric small marine animals and algae. (Terrestrial plants tend to form coal.) Over millennia this organic matter, mixed with mud, is buried under thick sedimentary layers of material. The resulting high levels of heat and pressure cause the remains to metamorphose, first into a waxy material known as kerogen, and then into liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons in a process known as catagenesis. Because hydrocarbons are less dense than the surrounding rock, these migrate upward through adjacent rock layers until they become trapped beneath impermeable rocks, within porous rocks called reservoirs. Concentration of hydrocarbons in a trap forms an oil field, from which the liquid can be extracted by drilling and pumping.
Geologists also refer to the “oil window”. This is the temperature range that oil forms in-below the minimum temperature oil does not form, and above the maximum temperature natural gas forms instead. Though this corresponds to different depths for different locations around the world, a ‘typical’ depth for the oil window might be 4 – 6 km. Note that oil may be trapped at much shallower depths, even if it is not formed there. Three conditions must be present for oil reservoirs to form: a rich source rock, a migration conduit, and a trap (seal) that concentrates the hydrocarbons.
The reactions that produce oil and natural gas are often modeled as first order breakdown reactions, where kerogen breaks down to oil and natural gas by a large set of parallel reactions, and oil eventually breaks down to natural gas by another set of reactions.
FORMATION OF OIL: Abiogenic theory
The idea of abiogenic petroleum origin was championed in the Western world by astronomer Thomas Gold based on thoughts from Russia, mainly on studies of Nikolai Kudryavtsev. The idea proposes that large amounts of carbon exist naturally in the planet, some in the form of hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are less dense than aqueous pore fluids, and migrate upward through deep fracture networks. Thermophilic, rock-dwelling microbial life-forms are in part responsible for the biomarkers found in petroleum.
According to the following authors; V. A. Krayushkin, T. I. Tchebanenko, V. P. Klochko, Ye. S. Dvoryanin from the Institute of Geological Sciences, Kiev, Ukraine, the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins is by no means simply an academic proposition. After its first enunciation by N. A. Kudryavtsev in 1951, the modern theory was extensively debated and exhaustively tested. Significantly, the theory not only withstood all tests put to it, but it also settled many previously unresolved problems in petroleum science, such as that of the intrinsic component of optical activity observed in natural petroleum. It also demonstrated new patterns in petroleum, previously unrecognized, such as the paleonological and trace-element characteristics of reservoirs at different depths. Most importantly, the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins has played a central role in the transformation of Russia (then the U.S.S.R.) from being a “petroleum poor” entity in 1951 to the largest petroleum producing and exporting nation on Earth, principally with the drilling and development of the oil and gas fields in the Dnieper-Donetsk Basin.
However, this theory is very much a minority opinion, especially amongst western geologists. It often pops up when scientists are not able to explain apparent oil inflows into certain oil reservoirs. However, most of these “abiotic” fields are explained as being the result of geologic quirks. No western oil companies are currently known to explore for oil based on this theory.
ALTERNATIVE MEANS OF PRODUCING OIL
As oil prices continue to escalate, other alternatives to producing oil have been gaining importance. The best known such methods involve extracting oil from sources such as oil shale or tar sands. These resources are known to exist in large quantities; extracting the oil at low cost and without too deleterious an impact on the environment remains a challenge.It is also possible to transform natural gas or coal into oil (or, more precisely, the various hydrocarbons found in oil).
The best-known such method is the Fischer-Tropsch process. It was a concept pioneered in Nazi Germany when imports of petroleum were restricted due to war and Germany found a method to extract oil from coal. It was known as Ersatz (“substitute” in German), and accounted for nearly half the total oil used in WWII by Germany. However, the process was used only as a last resort as naturally occurring oil was much cheaper. As crude oil prices increase, the cost of coal to oil conversion becomes comparatively cheaper.
The method involves converting high ash coal into synthetic oil in a multistage process. Ideally, a ton of coal produces nearly 200 liters (1.25 bbl, 52 US gallons) of crude, with by-products ranging from tar to rare chemicals.
Currently, two companies have commercialized their Fischer-Tropsch technology. Shell in Bintulu, Malaysia, uses natural gas as a feedstock, and produces primarily low-sulfur diesel fuels. Sasol in South Africa uses coal as a feedstock, and produces a variety of synthetic petroleum products. The process is today used in South Africa to produce most of the country’s diesel fuel from coal by the company Sasol. The process was used in South Africa to meet its energy needs during its isolation under Apartheid. This process has received renewed attention in the quest to produce low sulfur diesel fuel in order to minimize the environmental impact from the use of diesel engines.
An alternative method is the Karrick process, which converts coal into crude oil, pioneered in the 1930s in the United States.
More recently explored is thermal de-polymerization (TDP). In theory, TDP can convert any organic waste into petroleum.
Bissonet Humble Petroleum
Bissonet Lease at Humble Salt Dome Field
History
Humble Salt Dome Field was discovered in the early 1900’s. Bubbles of oil were first observed seeping from the ground near the San Jacinto river in 1887. Humble became an oil boomtown in the early 1900’s when oil was first produced here. The first oil was produced a couple years earlier after the famous Spindletop discovery in Beaumont Texas.
In the fall of 1902, George Hart spudded a well in the field on evidence of escaping gas in the area. His operation was halted by a blowout, an unexpected volume of gas under pressure, that forced the drilling equipment out of the hole. Blowouts were encountered in several wells in the part of the field later called “the hill” and drilled in the summer of 1904 by C.E. Barrett of Houston. Despite the menace of blowouts, some success was found in the early field when Higgins Oil and Fuel Company brought in a large-volume gas well half a mile Southeast of Barrett wells in October 1904. By the end of the year, Humble field reported two sporadically-producing oil wells that had yielded 2,000 barrels of oil. Since none of the crude had been sold, it was stored in earthen tanks for use in the field. Even though blowouts hampered field development, their threat was minimized by the invention of a blowout preventer in 1905. D.R. Beatty used the blowout preventer on the #2 Fee Well which gave up the first gusher with a potential of 8,500 barrels of oil a day from a depth of 1,012 feet.
From 1905 through 1913, development of the field concentrated on the caprock of the salt dome, producing at depths of 1,100 – 1,200 ft. When deep production was found on the dome flanks at Sour Lake Field, operators in Humble field drilled into zones below 2,500 ft., hoping to emulate the success at Sour Lake. In November 1913 the effort was rewarded when Producers Oil #11 Carroll cam in with a potential 10,000 barrels of oil per day at a total depth of 2,700 ft. Forty-six wells were completed before the end of the year, and production reached nearly 2.8 million barrels of oil. In 1935 the Wilson Oil House Well #1 came in at 1500 bopd from the 2,500 ft. sand on the north flank of the field.
Geological estimation of total reserves: 50,000,000 barrels of oil.
Estimated Payout: somewhere between 100 – 300 barrels of crude oil per day.
