Russia Claims Large Chunk of North Pole

kungfoofairy writes "Russia has laid claim to over one million square kilometers of the Artic. This announcement comes on the return of a scientific expedition into the region which found that the Lomonosov Ridge connects to Russia. The area is supposed to have a reserve of 10 billion tons of natural gas and oil. 'A BBC map shows Russia's proposal; this set of maps from The New York Times illustrates the area at stake and different ways it might be divided ... The Russians have tried to advance their claim before, and were turned away by the United Nations in 2001. The new geological data is evidently meant to improve the odds for a second try. '"

Comments

No one's getting the significance of this

[nido]

The area is supposed to have a reserve of 10 billion tons of natural gas and oil

Oil is everywhere on our small planet. Back in the 70's, Alaska's north slope underwent extensive exploration (search for 'Gull Island')- but the oil companies capped all their exploratory wells, never built the second Oil Pipeline, and just kept the wells at Prudhoe Bay flowing. Then they put forth the 'peak oil' theory, which holds that teh oil is going to run out. Now production at Prudhoe Bay is starting to decline, and they're saying, "see! we told you so - we're running out of oil. Simple supply & demand, that's all. Pay up, bitches."

Meanwhile, the Russians are operating with a different guiding philosophy. They found ways to restore the production of their old wells (the fields are being recharged from deeper in the earth), and are making lots of money on the world oil markets.

The inevitable result of this is that over time, the initial production rate of the well will slowly decline, a hard fact known to every exploration oilman in the business. However, this is certainly not an indication that the oil field itself is becoming depleted, proved thousands of times by offset wells drilled later into the same reservoir. Any new well comes on stream at the original production rate of its older cousins, because it has not yet had time to build up a thin layer of contaminates across the open hole. Though as we shall see it is possible to "do an oil change" on a producing well and bring it back to full production, this is extremely expensive, and rarely used in the west.
Look at a simple example: Say we have a small oil field in Iraq with ten wells that each started out in life producing 10,000 barrels of oil per day. Fine, for a known investment we are producing 100,000 barrels of oil per day from our small field, at least for a while. Five years later contamination may have slowed our overall production down by ten percent to 90,000 barrels per day. So we are now faced with a choice: either "do an oil change" on all ten existing wells at vast expense and down time, or simply drill one additional well into the same reservoir, thereby restoring our daily production to 100,000 barrels with the minimum of fuss. Take my word for it, ninety-nine percent of onshore producers will simply drill the extra well.
Naturally there are times and places where this simple process is not an option, for example on a huge and very expensive offshore platform, which may have only 24 drilling 'slots', all of which have been used up. To restore your overall production after five years you can either build another giant platform next door for two billion dollars, or "do an oil change" on each of your existing 24 wells, one at a time. Clearly this time you are forced to carry out the time consuming business of restoring the open hole section at the bottom of the well to its old pristine condition, before various contaminates started to slow down your production rate.
For this task you first pull the production tubing out of the hole, and then run back in with a drill string, to which is attached an underreamer as shown in the pictures above. When the reamer is directly opposite the top of the open hole producing section, the drill string is rotated to the right and the blades fly out under centrifugal force to a distance preset by you before lowering the tool into the hole. The objective is to cut away the contaminated face of the well to a depth you consider will once again expose pristine producing pores. As the spinning underreamer is slowly lowered, it enlarges the size of the hole, with the contaminated debris cut away and flushed back to surface by the drilling fluid. Hey presto, you have a new oil well, and it only cost one or two million do