Economic study of Oil and Gas Exploration

De: Roshdy Ebrahim PhD

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

One of the characteristics of oil in its early exploration and production has been the requirement of large capital investments for exploratory activity associated with unexplored fields surrounding new oil reserves, and costly development expenditures that are subsequently needed for extension and expanding of such fields once they were explored. Therefore, the evolution of the oil industry had not been and cannot be treated in a manner of a mom-and-pop enterprise in which capital has yet to turn into a well-developed process of concentration and centralization. On the other hand, in the late nineteenth century, Taylorism was just giving rise to standardization and thus automated assembly line mass production in need of capital on a scale beyond individual wealth. That is why oil was characterized by the assemblage of several financial syndicates for the venture of exploration in both the United States and abroad. And it is the minimum size of capital that in part plays a pivotal role in development of capitalist competition in oil and in other businesses. The genesis of hydrocarbon can be traced to colonial fusion of capitalistically developed and undeveloped parts of the world—a world whose overwhelming majority had not yet lived within capitalism proper. Exploration for petroleum originated in the latter part of the nineteenth century when geologists began to map land features that were favorable for the collection of oil in a reservoir. Of particular interest to geologists were outcrops that provided evidence of alternating layers of porous and impermeable rock. The porous rock (typically a sandstone, limestone, or dolomite) provides the reservoir for the petroleum while the impermeable rock (typically clay or shale) prevents migration of the petroleum from the reservoir. A basic rule of thumb in the upstream (or producing) sector of the oil and gas industry has been (and maybe still is in some circles of exploration technology) that the best place to find new crude oil or natural gas is near formations where it has already been found. The financial risk of doing so is far lower than that associated with drilling a rank wildcat hole in a prospective, but previously unproductive, area. you can get all the information about exploring oil and gas, economics, physics, and engineering information