These resources include oil sands, tar sands, heavy oil, and oil shale, but are beyond the scope of this website. Unconventional oil resources are produced by methods other than the traditional oil well.
See our Coalbed Methane page for a detailed description on this unconventional gas technology and the BMPs that help to regulate it.
Improve oil production and increase reserves.Benefits of Directional (Advanced) Drilling Technologies: Using this technology can be more cost effective and produce less waste and surface impacts than drilling multiple wells. Complex Path DrillingĬomplex well paths can have multiple twists and turns to try to hit multiple accumulations from a single well location. Wells can now reach out over 5 miles from the surface location and, dozens of wells can be drilled from a single location, reducing surface impacts. Extended Reach DrillingĮxtended reach drills allow producers to reach deposits that are great distances away from the drilling rig. This can help producers tap oil and natural gas deposits under surface areas where a vertical well cannot be drilled, such as under developed or environmentally sensitive areas. This dramatically increases production from a single well and reduces the number of wells drilled on the surface. Multilateral drilling allows operators to branch out from the main well to tap reserves at different depths. Sometimes oil and natural gas reserves are located in separate layers underground. Horizontal wells are attractive because they (1) can be used in situations where conventional drilling is impossible or cost effective,(2) reduce surface disturbance by requiring less wells to reach the reservoir, and (3) can produce as much as 15 to 20 times as much oil and gas compared to a vertical well. These horizontal “legs” can be over a mile long the longer the exposure length, the more oil and natural gas is drained and the faster it can flow. Horizontal drilling starts with a vertical well that turns horizontal within the reservoir rock in order to expose more open hole to the reservoir.
The cost for building horizontally drilled wells was only 2.1 times vertically drilled wells. In one study, horizontally drilled Canadian wells produced as much as 4.1 times the product when compared with vertically drilled wells. Oil is nearly always processed at a refinery natural gas may be processed to remove impurities either in the field or at a natural gas processing plant. Production sites often handle crude oil from more than one well. Production is the process of extracting the hydrocarbons and separating the mixture of liquid hydrocarbons, gas, water, and solids, removing the constituents that are non-saleable, and selling the liquid hydrocarbons and gas. Well development occurs after exploration has located an economically recoverable field, and involves the construction of one or more wells from the beginning (called spudding) to either abandonment if no hydrocarbons are found, or to well completion if hydrocarbons are found in sufficient quantities
The oil and gas extraction industry can be classified into four major processes:Įxploration involves the search for rock formations associated with oil or natural gas deposits, and involves geophysical prospecting and/or exploratory drilling. The Development Process The Basic Processįrom EPA Office of Compliance Sector Notebook Project, Profile of the Oil and Gas Extraction Industry, page 15