[ROCKMAN]

It wasn't Dog that foresakin' that place...it was the Dept of Transportation. It was just fine before them damn oil patch bastards started mucking it up.

[Keith_McClary]

I don't see how the Trans-Alaskan pipeline ... will be maintained, much less upgraded with heaters or flow control.

[ennui2]

Planty's been pretty silent in this thread.

I'd like to see if he's celebrating this decline or not, considering how much he supposedly cares about global warming.

[Tanada]

I know Russia has ice breaking tanker ships, I have seen video somewhere on Youtube of them arriving and leaving an off shore loading facility surrounded by ice. How much will it cost for the USA to build the same kind of ships and facility to keep getting oil from the North Slope when volumes are too low to use the TAPS?

[Tanada]

You'd also have to imagine some kind of oil terminal to load those ships. With harbor, marina, port, dry dock, support infrastructure, etc. Maybe the Russians built that stuff when there was lot of oil. We chose the pipeline instead. Probably too late to go back.

Most of that is not actually needed for what I am talking about. What Russia did was to build an underwater pipeline from the field out to deep water. At the deep water end the pipe come up above the surface heavily protected from ice floes and the ice breaking tankers pull right up to it year around to load oil. In summer and fall it is easy, no ice, but in winter and spring they smash their way through the ice to the terminal slowly but steadily. I don't know of any reason why the big companies with 250,000/bbl/d production on the North Slope of Alaska would not have an income incentive to build the same kind of oil terminal. Prices are low today, but I don't expect them to stay low forever. Maybe conventional field declines will erase the surplus, or consumption will go up as ever more people in China and India get private automobiles, or worst case scenario another middle east war breaks out that disrupts exports. In any case when prices start going back up nobody will want to just quit exploiting the fields in Prudhoe Bay.

http://www.ship-technology.com/projects ... l_ulyanov/
http://www.offshore-technology.com/proj ... azlomnoye/

[Alaska_geo]

What good is the long tail if it is frozen tight in an abandoned pipeline?

Above there was at least one link to article(s) that some changes in the production procedures included adding more heaters to parts of the pipeline as well as separating more of the water from the oil before it goes into the TAPS. That 300 kbpd red line in the chart above may need to be raised a bit. The red line indicates an estimate of when the flow rate through the TAPS could come to a grinding halt.

Some information came out in a court case (about the value of the pipeline for tax purposes) a few years ago regarding minimum flow rates through TAPS. I don't have the link handy, but it turns out that with the addition of heating at a couple of strategic points along TAPS, the pipeline could operate with flow as low as 100,000 bbl/day.

EDIT: I believe at least some of that work has already been done. Also keep in mind that the major issue regarding flow through TAPS is extreme low temperatures in winter. With warming temperatures, that may be less of an issue in the future.

[PeakOiler]

Here's an updated graph with data through Jan. 2016:



Last year the minimum rate was 390 tbpd. Anyone care to guess what this year's minimum rate will be?

vtsnowedin guessed 340 last year. I guessed 367. This year I will make a guess of 375 tbpd.

[Tanada]

Looking at that graph it seems like flows have plateaued in the usual bumpy fashion from mid 2012 to present. I remember they were doing a lot of field work, updating equipment, exploiting smaller known deposits and stuff like that. Any idea how long they can hold production around these levels?

[PeakOiler]

Looking at that graph it seems like flows have plateaued in the usual bumpy fashion from mid 2012 to present. I remember they were doing a lot of field work, updating equipment, exploiting smaller known deposits and stuff like that. Any idea how long they can hold production around these levels?

As discussed upthread, the annual fluctuations in the flow rate is determined by pumping efficiencies being better when it's colder, and when maintenance/upgrades (heaters, inspections, processing equipment improvements) is performed on the TAPS during the warmer months. So we can expect (and are already seeing) the decline this year.

Last year the rate maxed at 506 in December. January was 500 tbpd.

See http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbblpd_m.htm for the referenced data.

[PeakOiler]

Looking at that graph it seems like flows have plateaued in the usual bumpy fashion from mid 2012 to present. I remember they were doing a lot of field work, updating equipment, exploiting smaller known deposits and stuff like that. Any idea how long they can hold production around these levels?

I have the data plotted through March (April data will be released tomorrow) and it shows the similar 2-3 month increase from Feb-March and April?, after which the annual decline usually begins.

Jan-2016 500
Feb-2016 491
Mar-2016 495

I'll post a new graph after the April data are released.

[PeakOiler]

Here's the updated graph with data through April:



I was a little surprised that production went down, or stayed about the same, this April, compared to previous Aprils the last few years.

[PeakOiler]

Updated graph with data through May:



490 tbpd was May's number.

[PeakOiler]

No sine wave here...

[MD]

Alaska is still about about an aging pipeline, and the difficulties in maintaining a cost effective flow of resource through it. One day, perhaps soon, costs will outweigh benefits, and it will stop.

The only way to save it is by developing new flows. So far they are still out of reach.

It's "simple" math...

[PeakOiler]

Updated graph with data through June:



June production was 455 kbpd.

[ROCKMAN]

"...the better you do the job at exploiting this oil and I gas, the sooner it is gone." Which adds even more irony in regions like the Permian Basin where much of the horizontal drilling that produced higher rates were wells drilled in fully developed fields. Thus much of the recovery from these new wells would have evevtuly been produced by the original vertical wells. Difficult to quantify but it did accelerate the ultimate abandonment date to some degree.