Lil4X
Elio Addict
I agree, if we see a sudden and sustained spike in the cost of gas, the Elio will become a much more desirable product. As if it isn't already. But I don't really look for that spike to happen for several reasons:
Our global reserves are increasing as we are finding more oil. "Peak oil", like "global warming" was largely a popular boogeyman promoted by the green lobby - by those with no background in geology, reservoir engineering, production or refining. Peak oil theory was promoted in 1956 by Marion King Hubbert, a prominent Shell Oil geologist who estimated global oil reserves would peak by the mid '60's and assume a declining output from that point onward. Like those who constantly revise the date of the apocalypse, many armchair scientists kept predicting the day that the world's wells would start sucking air and the zombie apocalypse would be upon us. There are two problems with Hubbert's theory we've discovered over the past 30 to 50 years.
For well over sixty years there has been a formation called the "Austin Chalk" that curls from South Texas up through Louisiana, to emerge at the coast near Mississippi. This geological formation has been the ruin of hundreds of oil speculators since the '30's, as it seems to show rich strata of oil-bearing rock. Sadly, most of the investors in this play over the years have been doctors and lawyers, rather than geologists.
A quick lesson in basic petroleum geology here: Oil and other hydrocarbons like natural gas exist in small pore spaces within rock - like the holes in a sponge. Certainly oil is there, and conventional means of testing will indicate its presence, even its flow rate. We say that the formation rock has "porosity", meaning that it is porous. The other part of that evaluation is that the pore spaces within the rock must connect with one another. Hydrocarbon must be able to flow through the rock to reach the borehole for it to be extracted. This "permeability" of the reservoir rock is extremely important - and the Austin Chalk doesn't have much of it. One of the greatest repeating scams in the oil business was the Chalk. A wildcatter would drill into an oil-bearing formation, flow the well for a day or two and SELL the well to a group of speculators. About a week after the wildcatter moved his rig off the location, the well would dry up and the investors were now the proud owners of a two-mile dry posthole. Hydrocarbon trapped in individual pores isn't of much use because it's potential is extremely limited, so we have to reach and break down the individual pore spaces.
Technology comes to the rescue. In 1984 on a test well near Vanderbilt, TX, Mobil R&D drilled the world's first horizontal well. They drilled down into some well known formations, then using a combination of directional and top drive drilling techniques, turned the borehole 92° off vertical and proceeded to drill along a narrow formation, correcting the angle as they went. Rather than try to produce a trickle of oil from a two-foot thick formation, by drilling along it, they could draw from several hundred feet of producing zone. Well that solved the thin-bed problem, and some of the permeability problem, but how could they reach back into the formation to break open those pore spaces?
Hydraulic fracturing (known as "fracking" to the ignorant press) is an old technique that has been producing oil in Western Oklahoma and other oil-rich areas where "tight" formations are reluctant to give up hydrocarbon. When the well is completed and steel casing and liners run in the hole, they are cemented back to the borehole very tightly to control communication with the strata above. Once pressure-tested, the well is perforated by lowering small shaped charges down to the production zone and the charges fired, cutting neat holes in the casing (and or tubing) wall and a foot or a few feet back into the formation. At this point the well should begin to flow as the fluid-filled casing begins to take hydrocarbon, and surface pressure increases. Normally, the well will be flowed for a few days to a tank battery or a flare stack to prove the well before any permanent work is begun. If the well is not flowing freely at this point, a decision is made, based on reservoir studies to bring in a fracturing unit.
It may be a single pump truck, or a whole fleet of trucks with 1200hp aircraft engines (more recently turbojet engines) and large triplex pumps on their beds. These are connected to tubing run in the well and secured by a packer just above the perforated interval. Pressuring up the formation to several thousand psi with flow rates up to over 400 barrels per minute requires a lot of horsepower - and it's fairly common in deep, tight formations like those in Western Oklahoma. Under this kind of pressure, the formation rock cracks, and tiny channels reach far back into the formation from the wellbore. Sand injected into the frac fluid travels along these cracks to keep them propped open when the pressure's released. The result is a network of fine channels that reach back into the formation to artificially create the "permeability" that the formation lacks.
A word about the bad press these "frac jobs" are getting amongst the green contingent. First, natural oil seeps from Pennsylvania to the Santa Barbara Channel have furnished native peoples with tar and petroleum generally used in folk medicine for well over two millennia. Occasionally petroleum will leak out of the ground from very shallow formations whether we drill for it or not.
Today's producible volumes of hydrocarbon don't come from shallow formations anywhere near our water supplies, but generally from eight to fourteen thousand feet down - and some even deeper. Natural gas is normally found in economic quantities well below this horizon, and far below a number of "hard streaks" or shale caps that seal it off from groundwater that's normally only a couple hundred feet below the surface. We have long had strict procedures, even laws that require that drilling for hydrocarbon be isolated from our water table, and our deep aquifers, and although accidents can happen, there are means available to isolate and limit the damage very quickly. If you will note most of the pollution and destruction of wildlife habitat long bemoaned by the environmentalists never came to pass. Caribou herds are growing - cows finding the warmth of a few overhead passages of the Trans-Alaska line to be comforting in winter, fishing has improved in the Gulf of Mexico as sea life has discovered production platforms to be ready-made reefs on which they can make a home. Energy production is not at odds with our environment, quite the opposite in fact.
Along with better recovery technologies, we've vastly improved the seismic technology, both in data recovery and computer processing that allows us to look into deeper horizons, even under existing reservoirs to see much larger potential reservoirs yet to be drilled. Slowly, our hydrocarbon infrastructure, that is the pipelines, supertankers, and oil ports are growing - as long as we maintain some semblance of an energy policy here at home.
Now, how will an energy shortage affect the sales of Elio? First, I don't think that - other than seasonal adjustments - the price of oil in constant dollars is going to vary a whole lot over the next generation. With adjustments for inflation, we're paying only a few cents more for motor gasoline than we did in the early '50's. Yes, there have been a few short-term spikes, but because we are now producing more hydrocarbon here at home than ever before, we are making inroads on establishing a more solid, more diversified energy base. Elio is going to play a part in that as well. Once the vehicle is established with a gasoline engine, it's not a large step to diesel, natural gas, or even electric power - when the retail infrastructure becomes available to support it.
At the same time, we're using less motor gasoline, thanks to conservation, more efficient automobiles, and public concern. Elio will be a big part of that when our commuters are getting three times the mileage they are getting from a conventional 4-passenger sedan. That's not only a savings for our own budgets, but one for the nation as well.
Our global reserves are increasing as we are finding more oil. "Peak oil", like "global warming" was largely a popular boogeyman promoted by the green lobby - by those with no background in geology, reservoir engineering, production or refining. Peak oil theory was promoted in 1956 by Marion King Hubbert, a prominent Shell Oil geologist who estimated global oil reserves would peak by the mid '60's and assume a declining output from that point onward. Like those who constantly revise the date of the apocalypse, many armchair scientists kept predicting the day that the world's wells would start sucking air and the zombie apocalypse would be upon us. There are two problems with Hubbert's theory we've discovered over the past 30 to 50 years.
- Oil is a fungible commodity, like gold, wheat, pork bellies and orange juice - it's freely traded on the global market. It responds to supply and demand like any other commodity. We won't just run out one day, under conventional economic theory it will just keep increasing in cost. Earth's last few barrels will obviously be worth a LOT of money. But it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
- Oil is a renewable resource; it's beginning to look like a handful of Russian scientists were right twenty years ago when they proposed that oil is NOT the product of dead dinosaurs or ancient sea plankton now rotting miles beneath the earth's surface. One of the areas of heaviest investigation is that hydrocarbons are being formed in the earth's mantle and slowly rise and condense as they migrate toward the surface over thousands of years. Well if it's renewable, at what rate is it being renewed? Will we run out of hydrocarbon, then have to sit and wait a few thousand years for the reservoirs to re-fill? That part isn't completely clear, but it could lead to more responsible ways of using what we have and recycling what we can.
For well over sixty years there has been a formation called the "Austin Chalk" that curls from South Texas up through Louisiana, to emerge at the coast near Mississippi. This geological formation has been the ruin of hundreds of oil speculators since the '30's, as it seems to show rich strata of oil-bearing rock. Sadly, most of the investors in this play over the years have been doctors and lawyers, rather than geologists.
A quick lesson in basic petroleum geology here: Oil and other hydrocarbons like natural gas exist in small pore spaces within rock - like the holes in a sponge. Certainly oil is there, and conventional means of testing will indicate its presence, even its flow rate. We say that the formation rock has "porosity", meaning that it is porous. The other part of that evaluation is that the pore spaces within the rock must connect with one another. Hydrocarbon must be able to flow through the rock to reach the borehole for it to be extracted. This "permeability" of the reservoir rock is extremely important - and the Austin Chalk doesn't have much of it. One of the greatest repeating scams in the oil business was the Chalk. A wildcatter would drill into an oil-bearing formation, flow the well for a day or two and SELL the well to a group of speculators. About a week after the wildcatter moved his rig off the location, the well would dry up and the investors were now the proud owners of a two-mile dry posthole. Hydrocarbon trapped in individual pores isn't of much use because it's potential is extremely limited, so we have to reach and break down the individual pore spaces.
Technology comes to the rescue. In 1984 on a test well near Vanderbilt, TX, Mobil R&D drilled the world's first horizontal well. They drilled down into some well known formations, then using a combination of directional and top drive drilling techniques, turned the borehole 92° off vertical and proceeded to drill along a narrow formation, correcting the angle as they went. Rather than try to produce a trickle of oil from a two-foot thick formation, by drilling along it, they could draw from several hundred feet of producing zone. Well that solved the thin-bed problem, and some of the permeability problem, but how could they reach back into the formation to break open those pore spaces?
Hydraulic fracturing (known as "fracking" to the ignorant press) is an old technique that has been producing oil in Western Oklahoma and other oil-rich areas where "tight" formations are reluctant to give up hydrocarbon. When the well is completed and steel casing and liners run in the hole, they are cemented back to the borehole very tightly to control communication with the strata above. Once pressure-tested, the well is perforated by lowering small shaped charges down to the production zone and the charges fired, cutting neat holes in the casing (and or tubing) wall and a foot or a few feet back into the formation. At this point the well should begin to flow as the fluid-filled casing begins to take hydrocarbon, and surface pressure increases. Normally, the well will be flowed for a few days to a tank battery or a flare stack to prove the well before any permanent work is begun. If the well is not flowing freely at this point, a decision is made, based on reservoir studies to bring in a fracturing unit.
It may be a single pump truck, or a whole fleet of trucks with 1200hp aircraft engines (more recently turbojet engines) and large triplex pumps on their beds. These are connected to tubing run in the well and secured by a packer just above the perforated interval. Pressuring up the formation to several thousand psi with flow rates up to over 400 barrels per minute requires a lot of horsepower - and it's fairly common in deep, tight formations like those in Western Oklahoma. Under this kind of pressure, the formation rock cracks, and tiny channels reach far back into the formation from the wellbore. Sand injected into the frac fluid travels along these cracks to keep them propped open when the pressure's released. The result is a network of fine channels that reach back into the formation to artificially create the "permeability" that the formation lacks.
A word about the bad press these "frac jobs" are getting amongst the green contingent. First, natural oil seeps from Pennsylvania to the Santa Barbara Channel have furnished native peoples with tar and petroleum generally used in folk medicine for well over two millennia. Occasionally petroleum will leak out of the ground from very shallow formations whether we drill for it or not.
Today's producible volumes of hydrocarbon don't come from shallow formations anywhere near our water supplies, but generally from eight to fourteen thousand feet down - and some even deeper. Natural gas is normally found in economic quantities well below this horizon, and far below a number of "hard streaks" or shale caps that seal it off from groundwater that's normally only a couple hundred feet below the surface. We have long had strict procedures, even laws that require that drilling for hydrocarbon be isolated from our water table, and our deep aquifers, and although accidents can happen, there are means available to isolate and limit the damage very quickly. If you will note most of the pollution and destruction of wildlife habitat long bemoaned by the environmentalists never came to pass. Caribou herds are growing - cows finding the warmth of a few overhead passages of the Trans-Alaska line to be comforting in winter, fishing has improved in the Gulf of Mexico as sea life has discovered production platforms to be ready-made reefs on which they can make a home. Energy production is not at odds with our environment, quite the opposite in fact.
Along with better recovery technologies, we've vastly improved the seismic technology, both in data recovery and computer processing that allows us to look into deeper horizons, even under existing reservoirs to see much larger potential reservoirs yet to be drilled. Slowly, our hydrocarbon infrastructure, that is the pipelines, supertankers, and oil ports are growing - as long as we maintain some semblance of an energy policy here at home.
Now, how will an energy shortage affect the sales of Elio? First, I don't think that - other than seasonal adjustments - the price of oil in constant dollars is going to vary a whole lot over the next generation. With adjustments for inflation, we're paying only a few cents more for motor gasoline than we did in the early '50's. Yes, there have been a few short-term spikes, but because we are now producing more hydrocarbon here at home than ever before, we are making inroads on establishing a more solid, more diversified energy base. Elio is going to play a part in that as well. Once the vehicle is established with a gasoline engine, it's not a large step to diesel, natural gas, or even electric power - when the retail infrastructure becomes available to support it.
At the same time, we're using less motor gasoline, thanks to conservation, more efficient automobiles, and public concern. Elio will be a big part of that when our commuters are getting three times the mileage they are getting from a conventional 4-passenger sedan. That's not only a savings for our own budgets, but one for the nation as well.
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