The world is a pretty big place.  The industry will exploit any resources that it has access to.  People have been looking for oil for a long time and avoiding gas for most of that time.  The opportunities to find Saudi, Nigerian, North Slope, North Sea, or Gulf of Suez sized oil fields seems to be very limited from this point forward.  There are thousands of big gas fields that people know about but haven't been economic to produce in the past--LNG starts to change that.

This list of disjointed observations leads me to believe that most of the "overseas" work in the world will probably be gas for the forseeable future.  I would guess that there will continue to be some significant amount of work in oil fields, but would be suprised if many new world-class oil fields are discovered.  The gas businees seems right now to be in a buyer's market for Engineers.

Might I ask the reason for the question?

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
www.muleshoe-eng.com
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips Fora.

The Plural of "anecdote" is not "data"

Thank you! Excellent explanation.
There was not specific reason for that question. Just when I heard that, I surprised and liked to know why.
Thanks

Generally, the future of the oil industry is as the gas industry (gas is becoming a more popular fuel due to lower greenhouse gas emissions, places like the UK and the USA running out of their own gas), and many of the large oil companies would be better called gas companies now.  Also there's been a lot of work on producing 'stranded gas'- gas that's a long long way from a market, but where a LNG project isn't economic.  This stuff includes Gas to Liquids and the coselle concept, which may open up a lot of gas fields to development in the near future.

But there are still plenty of oil projects: most of the North Sea is mature oil field work (sidetrack drilling, CT drilling, TTRD drilling), there are wildcat opportunites in Russia (a pal is working in Siberia right now, where the nearest offset well is 250 MILES away), Iran and Iraq desperately need modern drilling and production technology and techniques on their oil fields and so on.

Gas is normally present in both oil and gas production.  Crude oil has many volatile components that can boil off at atmospheric conditions.  Thus, the gas is separated and the oil stabilized.  The oil can be sent to refining.  The US and other western countries have many environmental restrictions as well as expansion restrictions around existing plants.  Thus few new refinery projects exist in the US.  In addition to gas phase pipelines and LNG facilities for transportation, gas can be used for feed to the petrochemical business.  Gas is generally a cleaner business than oil.  Many fields historically burned the gas that is now being captured.

John

Another issue may be that quite often "oil engineering" is pretty simple while "gas engineering" tends to be more complex. Hence local offices may have sufficient experience to do the job without expensive help from outside?

Best regards

Morten

Morten,
I'm finding what you say to be a very real situation, especially in surface facilities and downhole pumping.  Many "oil" companies (and the SPE) see "facilities engineering" from the lens of "onshore, rod-pumped, oil field".  Those facilities have never been as easy as the industry pretended they were, but we were able to pretend for over 100 years.  

Applying that same logic to gas has been a receipe for disaster.  Companies are starting to see that back-of-the-envelope designs in compressible flows can get expensive quickly.  You can usually tell when a company has their break-through when they stop trying to do "artificial lift" on gas wells and start doing "de-liquification"--a lot of the same equipment, but with very different goals (i.e., when the liquid is gone in an oil well, you're done; when it is gone in a gas well you're just getting started).

Hence the tendency to use more engineers in gas than in oil.

David

A google search on the words "Fisher Tropsch" or "Gas to Liquids" produces some interesting reading.  At least the Quataris seem to have recognized that there is a market for the gas if converted to a product that the world is in need of, namely light distillates.  And, I might add, a product that can be shipped to markets that need it.  

From other reading, I ascertain that the automobile industry in europe is well on its way to using diesel as the primary fuel, and I predict that if this FT concept produces the results anticipated, that so will the USA.  California is already in love with it due to the fact that FT Diesel does not have any sulfur emissions.

Also, some of these new GTCC plants that are either mothballed or seldom operated because of high gas prices in the USA might have some new life if located close enough to transportation infrastructure (pipelines, water ways, rivers, etc.) to fire light distillate instead of gas.  (And if the Quataris, et. al. price their product to compete with gas and LNG.)

Just a few of my thoughts.

rmw

The other thing that's happening is that we are having to go to the harder to develop fields that were discovered some time ago and left alone because they were well, hard to develop.

Offshore that means three things: heavy oil (West of Shetland, Clare has just come on stream; 30 years after it was discovered), deepwater fields and HPHT fields.  HPHT fields aren't really oil and they aren't really gas, but they are really challenging, interesting projects....completion designs at 16,000psi and 250 celcius (not farenheit!) anyone?

One reason Qatar is developing GTL is the North Field gas composition.   I saw a presentation once and there has to be a very precise make-up of components in the gas to be economical.   Small shifts in the gas composition will change the ability to refine the full range of products required to be economical.   My understanding is the North Field constains very "rich" gas.