GOM Reservoir Size Distributions

Question:

BigMoose on June 14, 2010 - 6:26pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Parent subthread | Comments top

I have heard many unofficial estimates of the magnitude of oil in this formation... 2nd largest in America, 2nd largest in the world...

Does anyone have a credible estimate on the formation reserves?

Some historical data available from the MMS.
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/PDFs/2009/2009-064.pdf

On the basis of proved oil, for 8,014 proved undersaturated oil reservoirs, the median is 0.3 MMbbl, the mean is 1.8 MMbbl.

Peak Oil theory (Entropic Dispersive Aggregation) says the cumulative size distribution of reservoirs (ranked small to large) goes as P(Size)=1/(1+0.3/Size) if we assume a median of 0.3. It doesn't quite follow this exactly because infinite sized reservoirs can not exist.

If you want the raw data it is here:
file:///G:/RE/Shared/EOGR%20Report/2008-034%20Estimated%20Oil%20and%20Ga...

Sorry, that was a joke, the MMS puts the information on a public web server, and the data is retrieved as a local filesystem URL?
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/pubinfo/freeasci/geologic/estimated2006.html

I placed whatever data I could get into Google Docs, and placed theory next to it.

The MMS is to be split into 3 agencies apparently. Throughout their history, they failed in doing any kind of useful depletion analysis in the GOM. Anyone can collect data; interpreting it is the challenging part.