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Jeffrey Ball, Lone Star Rising. In a dusty swath of West Texas known as the Permian Basin, a historic oil boom is pushing US production to record levels and bringing sudden wealth to local landowners -- along with thorny challenges. As they rush to invest. oil majors like Exxon Mobil are betting that this bonanza has staying power. Fortune, June 2018
http://fortune.com/longform/permian-basin-oil-fortune-500/
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(I) "Smack in the middle of Grier Brunson's family's ranch, a patch of West Texas dirt that sprawls across 45 square miles, sits a lush, green dip in the land that the family calls 'the draw.' Thousands of years ago, Pueblos built rocky settlements here. Hundreds of years ago, Comanches thundered on horseback across this plain. Today, the natural bounty in and around the draw is producing a rather more modern stampede [of shale oil and natural gas]. On the rim of the draw, amid the mesquite trees and the sagebrush, oil rigs loom
(II) In and around the draw: "Two miles underground, oil—thousands of barrels of it every day, worth millions of dollars—is being cracked loose from the rock and pulled up
(III) "Under the terms of the mineral leases they've signed with oil companies, Brunson and his extended family receive one-quarter of the revenue from every barrel the drilling companies pull up. The Brunsons have about 50 wells on the ranch, of various sizes and ages. With oil trading around $70 per barrel, among the most prolific of those wells could generate as much as $3.8 million per year in royalties before taxes for the Brunsons. And that's just for the oil. The Brunsons earn additional royalties from the sale of the natural gas and other hydrocarbons that come up with the oil. And they earn fees from the drilling companies for permission to install infrastructure such as pipelines.
(IV) "Brunson's land sits in the bull's-eye of the Permian Basin, a petroleum-rich swath of western Texas and southeastern New Mexico—bigger than North Dakota—that is experiencing a gusher of production growth epic even by the outsize standards of the Lone Star State. The boom is remaking every aspect of life in this parched part of the country
(V) "Oil production in the Permian soared to 3.2 million barrels per day in May. And it helped push total US production above 10.2 million barrels per day in February. That was the highest that US production has been since the federal government began keeping records in 1920—higher even than the prior peak of 10 million barrels per day in November 1970, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA)[, US Department of Energy]. In April, an average of 449 rigs were drilling holes in the Permian, according to market-data firm Baker Hughes. That was 44% of all the rigs drilling that month in the U.S. And it was 22% of all the rigs drilling in the world.
(VI) "Some compare the Permian's buried treasure to that of Saudi Arabia's Ghawar field, widely regarded as the mother of all giant petroleum troves
(VII) "What has oil executives salivating is that the Permian, as it finishes its first century of production, may just be getting started.
(VIII) "Ever since 1923, when a now legendary oil well southeast of Midland called the Santa Rita No 1 struck black gold, the Permian Basin has been known as a big one.
(IX) "What makes the Permian so alluring is that it's a massive geologic platter 大而平的碟子 [盛满 pancakes with syrup]. Over millions of years, the death and decay of critters and the buildup of sediment has produced countless layers of oily rock—in particular, shale. Oilmen call each layer a 'pay'—a rock-hard pancake full of hydrocarbon syrup just waiting to be tapped and sold. In the number of these pancakes and in their thickness, the Permian may well be unparalleled.
(X) "Understanding why [in years past shale oil or gas was not recoverable] requires realizing that buried oil doesn't exist in vast pools; rather, it sits, as if in a sponge, inside tiny holes in rocks. The rocks that are easiest to tap have both high porosity (meaning: big holes) and high permeability (holes that connect well to each other). Shale tends to have both low porosity and low permeability. It is, in the lingo, tight. Which used to mean the oil was essentially trapped.
(XI) After fracking was put to use about a decade ago: "Initially, the industry deployed these techniques in lesser shale plays such as the Bakken formation—in North Dakota, Montana, and Canada—and in the Eagle Ford, in South Texas, because they were simpler to drill. The Permian is a more complex area, but it's also vastly richer with oil. Now that the drillers have mastered its geology, the basin's production has begun to explode.
(XII) "Simon Flowers, [industry analysis firm] Wood Mackenzie's chief analyst, likens the global impact of the Permian to that of North Sea, which ushered in the era of large-scale deepwater drilling some 40 years ago. 'The Permian,' he says, 'is of that scale.'
(XIII) "There are quite a lot of locations in the Permian, 'in the best of the sweet spot,' says Flowers, where companies are reporting that they can produce oil with favorable returns at a global oil price lower than $30 per barrel
(XIV) "The Permian, in short, is a window onto an energy system that's heading back to the future—to a time that, in fundamental ways, looks a lot like the start of the Oil Age a century ago. Over the years, Big Oil has buzzed over a succession of faraway frontiers: Saudi Arabia, Russia, West Africa. Now it's agog anew about the place where it effectively was born: the West Texas desert.
(XV) "The Permian's hub is Midland, a city of about 150,000 people. It was founded in the 1880s essentially as a way station—the midway point on the Texas and Pacific Railway between Fort Worth and El Paso. * * * The most iconic structure remains downtown's Petroleum Building, an ornate 12-story tower that was finished in 1929, months before the economy and oil prices crashed.
(XVI) "Unlike in, say, deepwater basins off Africa or Asia, the goal in the Permian isn't so much to find the oil, because the oil here in West Texas long ago was found. The goal here is more workmanlike: to assemble the acreage that contains the most oil and to execute the drilling and fracking plan that will pull it out at the lowest cost.
(XVII) In Midland, Texas: "A typical modern rig is several stories tall, its drill bit controlled by an operator who, sitting in a booth called a 'doghouse,' monitors a bank of computer screens and guides it with a joystick.
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发表于 7-11-2018 16:39:07
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