Petroleum Digest
1. While there are reports highlighting that oil was discovered in China in 600 BC itself - with the first known oil wells in China were created by combining iron drill bits with bamboo pipe in 347 CE, where wells were drilled to depths up to 790 feet; then, why did it take - almost 2000 years - for the Drake well to appear, which is supposed to be the first commercial oil well in US drilled in 1859 to depths up to 69.5 feet?
2. Although, in 1691, Bernardo Ramazzini (1633-1714) acknowledged the nature of the artesian wells of Modena (Italy), and later identified the flow mechanism of waters through sand; while, in 1715, Antonio Vallisnieri (1661-1730) expanded on Ramazzini’s observations and formulated a theory on the cycle of underground water using a modern scientific-hydrogeological language; then, again, why did it take another 150 years for the French engineer Henry Philibert Gaspard Darcy (1803-1858) to provide the earliest and seminal thesis on the measurement of the flow rate of liquids in porous media in 1856?
It’s now more than 150 years - having realized the fact that in a heterogeneous petroleum reservoir - we cannot directly apply the concept of “total discharge being proportional to the total pressure drop divided by the fluid viscosity and that the linear coefficient (called permeability) remaining intrinsic to the investigated porous layer”, then, still, how long will it still take for us to deduce an explicit momentum conservation equation that characterizes multi-phase, compressible fluid flow under heterogeneous, anisotropic, transient, non-isothermal conditions associated with unconventional reservoirs having unconventional resources - probably @ pore-scale?
The concept of material balance, although, it was able to identify initial hydrocarbon in place, estimate production at various pressure, and explain the primary production mechanism – could not be applied to complex reservoirs as it cannot provide any data on the dynamics of reservoir drainage principles. Feasible to have such a barrier for Darcy’s law in the (near) future in petroleum application?
OR
Muskat’s modified version of Darcy’s law
(which paved way for describing multi-phase fluid flow by replacing ‘hydraulic gradient’ with ‘pressure gradient’, and whereby, ‘permeability’ becomes a property of porous medium dictated by pore-geometry alone; and thus, separating the properties of rock from that of the fluid by manipulating Darcy’s original proportionality constant) – along with Hubbert’s, Dalberg’s & England’s contribution itself -
would keep rocking in petroleum industry - for another century?
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Correction