Problems exploiting and extracting crude oil?

thanks x]Problems exploiting and extracting crude oil?
Are you asking what sort of problems there are in doing so? LOTS! Entirely too many to cover here. first you have to find it, then you have to figure out how to get to it. if it is in very deep water you have to work out a method of drilling for it, either using an existing drillship, or designing and building a custom platform, then you have to figure out how to get the oil and gas to market. how to drill the formation in order to extract the oil and gas optimally, this usually means drilling an array of wells to intersect the formation at specific points so that you can reinject the produced gas, or inject treated seawater into the formation from wells on the periphery to force the oil towards production wells. then you have to figure out how to prevent the subsea pipelines from freezing up with methane hydrates. And that does not even address the normal drilling problems of high pressure gas pockets or loss of circulation or washouts or collapse of the wellbore due to unconsolidated sand, etc.





If it is onshore and in the arctic (alaska or siberia) you have to work out logistics to get the rig to and from the wellsite and get the well drilled and producing during the winter months while the tundra is still frozen solid because one it thaws, it turns into mush and you can't drive trucks on it or put heavy structures (like drilling rigs) on it. and everything has to be made from special steel that does not shatter when it gets really cold. regular carbon steel gets very brittle at or near the freezing point of water and these places are far colder than that. everything has to be made from cold tough alloy steel.


An example: BP/Exxon-Mobil's Thunderhorse field. the two companies spent something like 18 billion dollars over something like a decade to bring that field online, and in the process they almost sank the world's largest production platform ever built when it was abandoned ahead of a minor hurricane but the abandonment procedure had a fatal error in it. once they fixed that, the discovered that the subsea manifolds had cracks in the weld overlay and they had to retrieve them and repair them. they ended up losing 2 years on the original production schedule.


How many companies can afford to invest that kind of money over that length of time to bring a potential project online? Not many.Problems exploiting and extracting crude oil?
Location,


cost,


commodity prices


government regulations/laws,


political instability (i.e. wars, nationalization),


technology that hasn't yet been developed.





These are few than I came up with off the top of my head.