Oil

A still plentiful resource

Since the dawn of the oil era a century and a half ago, some 1 trillion barrels of oil - about 159 trillion liters - have been produced. Although this is a colossal amount, production to date has not come close to exhausting the world's stores of black gold. Based on current technological capabilities, it is estimated that another trillion barrels could still be extracted from known fields; this oil is referred to as proved global reserves. That amounts to about a third of the oil in known reservoirs, because current production techniques are capable of recovering an average of 32% of the oil in place. Besides these reserves, potential sources include future discoveries, estimated at 1 trillion barrels, and so-called unconventional oil. Heavy and viscous, unconventional crude is critically important, since it could supply up to a trillion barrels, or as much again as proved conventional oil reserves.

Alwyn: expertise of a mature field (July 2008) 

Expanding the scope of possible reserves

However, the era of "easy oil" is behind us. The most accessible, easiest-to-produce fields were tapped to supply the oil markets of the 20th century. With demand growing by an average of 1 to 1.5% a year, it is now imperative to ferret out oil in environments that were barely considered feasible just a few years ago. Reservoirs buried more than 4,000 meters below the surface, fields lying below the seabed or hard-to-reach mountainous terrain, oil traps under the Arctic ice and immobile heavy oil in the cold ground of Canada are all challenges we must meet to achieve the necessary growth in global production.

The North Sea: Jura, total exhilaration (June 2008)

New frontiers in exploration

You might reasonably assume that oil exploration has already circled the globe, but you'd be wrong. Like other sciences, geology is constantly advancing and refining its understanding of how oil traps are formed. Total E&P's geologists work in a combined total of 20 specialties, studying source rocks, the sedimentary deposit processes that create reservoirs, the structure of oil basins and reservoirs, the micro-organisms in sediments and many areas. To top it off, seismic technology is allowing geophysicists to locate new targets deep within the Earth's crust. Vibrations ripple belowground and are partially reflected back to the surface by the geological strata they encounter, yielding millions of data that are processed to recreate a 3D image of the subsurface. Sophisticated data acquisition methods and ever more powerful supercomputers are opening up horizons whose existence was unsuspected in the recent past.

Seismic Survey in Mauritania (March 2007)

The art of appraising finds

Finding oil is just the beginning. E&P's geoscientists then have to answer a multitude of questions, including: How much total oil does a reservoir contain? How is it distributed among the deposit's stacked strata? What are the temperatures and pressures from top to bottom of the reservoir? Is the oil light or viscous and does its composition vary based on position? Are there faults will impede or, conversely, facilitate its production? State-of-the-art laboratories, proprietary software applications and expertise honed by experience all go into what is, for the uninitiated, an unfathomable step that will ultimately predict how many barrels can be produced over the life of a field.

Producing more, more efficiently

Today, oil is not just more difficult to extract, but also more expensive to produce. It can cost over $10 billion to develop some sites. Total E&P is a past master at bringing on stream these gigantic industrial puzzles requiring scores of construction sites worldwide over stretches of several years. Technological innovation - wells drilled several kilometers deep to reach geological strata a few meters thick, production equipment installed on the ocean floor and operated remotely by onboard electronics - is pushing back the boundaries of what our teams can do and countering the natural decline in production from mature fields. Coupled with these challenges is E&P's firm commitment to minimize as much as it can the environmental impact of its industrial activities, especially on water and air.