Pareto's Principle of Oil Fields
Published in Business Line dated Feb 05, 2007
Deals with the size distribution of Oil fields and shows that a very small number i.e. 120 (3%) of the oil fields in production today contributes a disproportinately large share of the output (47%). Even within this 120, a mere 14 fields (also known as the elephant oil fields) contribute nearly 20% of the world's output with an average daily production of nearly 1mbpd.
How this relates to Peak Oil is that all these large fields were discovered 3-4 decades back. The elephant oilfields have an average age of 55 years with the last discovery being made in the 1970's. The essential conclusion is that when these large fields go into decline we will not be able to replace them with new fields and so the Peak of the giant fields would also mean the Peak for world-wide Oil production.
Deals with the size distribution of Oil fields and shows that a very small number i.e. 120 (3%) of the oil fields in production today contributes a disproportinately large share of the output (47%). Even within this 120, a mere 14 fields (also known as the elephant oil fields) contribute nearly 20% of the world's output with an average daily production of nearly 1mbpd.
How this relates to Peak Oil is that all these large fields were discovered 3-4 decades back. The elephant oilfields have an average age of 55 years with the last discovery being made in the 1970's. The essential conclusion is that when these large fields go into decline we will not be able to replace them with new fields and so the Peak of the giant fields would also mean the Peak for world-wide Oil production.
posted by Shanmuganathan N @ 9:36 PM
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