Oil Per Acre

[Hosnon]

I'm doing a research project and can't find any data on the average output per acre of oil.

Does anyone know where I can find the information?

[sweetheart]

1. That's dependent on the strata

Oil in some strata is much more extractable at different dollars per barrel, and these
different extraction costs change the desirability of that oil. Realistically, every
acre of earth has energy in it that can be harvested, just the extraction costs will
generally be higher than the yeild. The economist ran an article on global private (national)
oil companies that hold over 90% of global reserves, and these are undisclosed per se as
national security info.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0008-4085%28196908%292%3A3%3C443%3APATEEO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9&size=LARGE

[Hosnon]

2. Thanks...I'm assuming that the oil is extractable enough for an oil

to invest in its extraction given today's economic circumstances.

I can't find ANYTHING and it's a bit annoying.

[GliderGuider]

3. That seems an odd measure.

Oil fields vary enormously in their content and size, expecially in the depth of the "pay" which is a measure of the thickness of the oil-bearing rock stratum of the field under consideration. It's also not easy to determine the actual area of an oil field. Many fields are interlinked by geological zones of very low oil content, though they belong to the same overall geological structure. The reason you have not seen this data (output per acre) is because nobody measures oil fields that way. It doesn't strike me as a useful figure of merit. What kind of information are you interested in communicating? There may be better ways of describing it.

[Hosnon]

4. Primarily, given an acre of land with known oil reserves, what is the

expected range of production and what is the expected average?

[sweetheart]

5. Kilowatts per acre

Every acre on earth will have a harvestable energy quotient, combined
from wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, electrostatic, tidal, petro and nuclear,
all of which can be harvested from any acre on earth with an activation investment cost,
that divides out the kilowatts to be "cost per kilowatt" the big number. The economics
are key key to the equation, people don't care what supplies the energy when sources
are fungible and the externalities are priced-in-service.

[GliderGuider]

6. You can't measure it that way

The production of an oil field is constrained by a number of factors. The big factors are the permeability of the rock, the viscosity of the oil (how "light" or "heavy" it is), what technology is being used to recover it (natural pressure; downhole pumps; steam, water or nitrogen field pressurization; vertical, horizontal or bottlebrush drilling) and especially how much of the original reserve has already been extracted. The significance of the actual area of the field being worked pales beside these factors. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that the production rate for different fields of the same area could vary by four orders of magnitude or more - say from 20 barrels per day or less to 200,000 barrels per day or more. This is why I said the notion of "an average production per acre" isn't a helpful figure.

To make matters worse, information about oil fields and reserves are very closely held, especially by national oil companies. This means that in many cases we don't know how big the fields are or what their reserves are. Especially for the latter factor it's hard to determine reserves accurately inthe first place, and there is tremendous political and commercial incentive for reserve holders to lie about them.

You could sum up the declared physical sizes all the oil fields in the world, and divide that by the global production. I have no idea of the size of all the world's oil fields, but let's say for argument it's 1 million acres. Global production is 84 million barrels per day. So you divide one by the other and arrive at a synthetic number of 84 barrels/acre/day. What does this number tell you, when some stripper wiells in Texas yield a barrel a day, while a well in the Ghawar field of Saudi Arabia is pumping 30,000 barrels per day out of the same physical area?

Sorry to be a bit negative, but there is a good reason you can't find this sort of number on the net. Is there another datum you can use to communicate the same underlying point?

[Hosnon]

7. How about if the area was narrowed down to a particular state?

I don't know much about oil production...at all. Placing feelers out and so far you've been quite helpful.

[GliderGuider]

8. You can narrow it down to countries.

Each country publishes its annual oil production figures, and they are helpfully recorded by BP in a downloadable Excel workbook called the "BP Statistical Review". It's available here. You can find out the area for each country using Google, then it's a simple division to find the annual production per unit area. You'll be surprised how much the numbers vary, though.

This workbook will also show you that countries' production varies over time. This is one of the basic principles of a theory called "Peak Oil", that postulates that global oil production will at some point reach a peak rate and then begin an irreversible decline.