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Shale-Oil Production Resilience and Associated Shale-Oil Reserves - Towards a Global Approach Based On the Principles of the Petroleum System
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, 79th EAGE Conference and Exhibition 2017, Jun 2017, Volume 2017, p.1 - 5
Abstract
Global inventory of shale-oil reserves is in progress in several institutions (EIA, USGS, AAPG) or O&G companies on a basin by basin basis in order to eventually estimate their global potential. In order to reach more quickly an order of magnitude of worldwide shale-oil reserves, we propose to use the Petroleum System Yield (PSY), defined (G. Demaison [1991] as the ratio between the accumulated hydrocarbons in conventional traps (HCA) and hydrocarbons generated by the sourcerock (HCG). Using a proxy for amount of the migrated oil from the source-rocks, we derive the retained accumulation: 75 000 Gbo of shale-oil resources could be trapped in source-rocks worldwide.
Thanks to the very peculiar LTO reservoirs and mainly to the newly created, oil wet, intra-kerogen porosity during burial, we assume that recovery factors of around 10% can be used. These shale-oils petrophysics clearly account for their high production resilience contemplated since the 2014 drilling turmoil and allow to calculate a worldwide un-risked shale-oil reserves of around 7500 Gbo. Assuming that only shale-oil basins in (semi) desert conditions will be easily developed, the global LTO reserves should reach 1500 Gbo which double the present conventional oil remaining reserves and deeply change the oil production forecasts.