British Petroleum Industry Essay

So what is this mysterious black gold substance that everyone refers to as crude oil? Basically, crude oil is a petroleum based substance that is naturally formed from plants and animals that roamed the Earth millions of years ago. These microorganisms settled deep within our Earth’s crust and comprises of numerous minerals, hydrocarbons, organic compounds and inconsequential traces of metals. Crude oil cannot just be drawn up from the ground and shoved into someone’s gas tank without first being refined

The steam acts as a separating agent to isolate the bitumen from the other constituents (Anderson et al., 2010). Bitumen that is extracted by in situ processes is upgraded into more valuable synthetic crude and then refined into fuel for gasoline or diesel. The remaining bitumen is directly processed as raw (Bergenson, Charpentier, & MacLean, 2009).

Then, at a refinery, crude oil undergoes several processes that change it into many different useful products (including fuels, fertilizers, plastics, and paving materials). Overall, the oil goes through three processes inside a refinery – Distillation, Conversion, and Alkylation. Oil also goes through a desulfurization process to remove unwanted chemicals. These unwanted chemicals are released into our atmosphere, which is detrimental to the climate. Also, 647 million gallons of oil processed a day. In a Crude tower (also known as a fractionating tower) heat from a furnace is added to crude oil. Next, gasoline boils a a relatively low temperature and is separated when the crude oil is boiled. When it reaches 730℉ to 850℉ , the heaviest components from the bottom of the tower will break up (Oil to Car). Gasoline is not distributed evenly around the world. More than half of the world’s oil reserves are in the Middle East, which contain more oil than the rest of the world combined. The next regions that have the most oil reserves are Canada and the United States, Latin America, Africa, and the region occupied by the

When steam is injected to the formation a steam chamber around the well is created [3]. The pressure of the steam should be lower than the fracture pressure of the rock mass to prevent the deflection of the rock [4]. Steam injection will go on for months during which the steam chamber expands and the viscosity of the bitumen decreases. This will cause the bitumen to flow down under gravity towards the production well. The produced oil is then pumped to the surface. Surface facilities are then used to separate the water

Future Fuel is a small oil company characterized by individuals who are supporters of sustainability and have legitimate concern for the environment and are also aware of the growing 'green ' movement .As a result we have plans of increasing the research and development budget for seeking new renewable and viable alternative sources of energy as well as equipping the headquarters and 8 other sites in the west with renewable energy systems .Questions like what we are aiming to achieve, our position on corporate social responsibility, what the company owe to shareholders ,what return on investment is required, and finally how we shall balance the needs of shareholders and the need to innovate will be examined below;

British Petroleum is one of the biggest oil and gas organizations around the world. British Petroleum had the rights to investigate the Macondo all around, situated in the Gulf of Mexico in 2009. Events like Deep Water Horizon explosion has also been taken place under the supervision of the British Petroleum company. Because of the absence of regulations, both inward and outward, and in additionally due to the reduction in the health and safety budget decision by the higher management, the incident of the Deep Water Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico region has happened. Despite the fact that the oil kit was rented by British Petroleum, an organization named Transocean claimed and worked the Deep Water Horizon. Their activities, deliberate or not, changed the lives of numerous people and eventually denied them of their basic universal rights. By neglecting to protect individuals from destitution, British Petroleum, abused their insignificant obligations and acted in a totally deceptive manner. Due to the oil spill, the tourism and fishery industry is severely damaged and the aquatic life and human life are facing the consequences still today. British Petroleum should dependably survey conceivable dangers, and discover

Our society runs on oil. It powers our cars, planes and trains, it’s used to build our workplaces and homes, even forming the plastics of our children’s toys, cell phones, and even the very laptop that this essay was typed on. But, oil is not an unlimited resource. As our society’s needs for oil keep growing and growing, the need for more of this oil to be extracted from the earth also increases, leading to new and complex ways of extracting oil. Fracking, tar sand extraction, and offshore oil rigs are all technologies developed solely to fuel our society’s ever-growing demand for petroleum products. However, sometimes the pressure of demand is so strong on the developers of these methods

Crude oil is a critical piece of our energy infrastructure. In recent years, there has been increasing demand on crude oil and a large growth in unconventional oil sources to serve our energy requirements such as the bitumen oil sands deposits in Northern Alberta, Canada. Unlike traditional oil extraction, in the oil sands hot water or steam [1] is required to remove oil from the high viscous bitumen deposits. This extraction process consumes a large volume of water with major oil producers consuming on an average 3.1 barrels of water for the production of 1 barrel of oil with 15-20% coming from fresh water bodies [2-4].

of processing heavy/sour crude oil is high; this is why the price of sweet/light crude oil is much

Smart waterflooding has recently proven more effective in improving the contemporary recovery processes through the manipulation of the salinity and compositions of the injected water. Different approaches have been tested by various research groups to evaluate its effectiveness, such as brine dilution and ionic variation. The brine dilution approach, also known as low-salinity, which involves lowering of the total brine salinity, has shown tremendous improvement in oil recovery from core experiments using clay-rich sandstone rocks in the range of 5-30% oil originally in place (OOIP) (Jadhunandan and Morrow, 1995; Lager et al., 2008; McGuire et al., 2005; Tang and Morrow, 1999; Webb et al., 2005; Yildiz and Morrow, 1996). Similar improvements, between 3% and 19% OOIP, have been observed in carbonate reservoirs, though the brine dilution effects and its underlying mechanisms are more complex in carbonate than sandstone reservoirs (Austad et al., 2011; Chandrasekhar and Mohanty, 2013; Romanuka et al., 2012; Yi and Sarma, 2012; Yousef et al., 2011; Zahid et al., 2012). Essentially, this is because the bonding energy between the carboxylic component of oil and carbonate rocks is higher than with sandstone rocks (Awolayo et al., 2015). As a result, carbonate rocks are oil-wet, though not all, instead they are usually mixed-wet subject to the nature of the rock mineral surface, oil properties, and their interactions (Anderson, 1986; Donaldson et al., 1969; Morrow, 1990). It is the

The Houston Refinery’s current configuration refines light crudes with some capacity to refine heavy crude oil. With the proposed expansion the objective is to increase the capacity for the heavier crude oil at the refinery, the heavy crude oil would be brought in by tankers from Mexico and off-loaded at the refinery docks and piped into the

Currently, demand for oil in the United States is growing. However, production of oil through the conventional methods has decreased. Moreover, since 1970, the oil reserves in the U.S. have been falling by about 3.8% per year, as there is a slowdown in oil discoveries (OTA 1978). Thus, application of new technologies to improve the extraction of oil is essential. One of the proven techniques to eliminate this problem is enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method. It is known that implementation of EOR in several states of the U.S. has been successfully extracting most of oil in the wells. In the EOR process gas or heated fluid is injected into reservoirs to produce additional oil from the oil fields. In the U.S. there are three main types of EOR methods, namely: thermal methods, chemical injection and gas flooding. This project will argue that although chemical injection and thermal methods have their strengths gas flooding is the most efficient way of oil recovery. First, a brief overview about oil recovery and stages of this process will be addressed. Then, general characteristics of EOR methods will be examined. Finally, those methods will be evaluated according to the criteria of efficiency, environmental sustainability and cost.

The paper introduces how selecting a methodology for enhanced oil recovery methods depends on good planning includes selecting the applicable EOR process, Characterizing the reservoir, defining parameters of the engineering design, accomplish field tests as needed , studying economic, and completing with a plan to achieve the project expectations. However this paper focus on non-thermal EOR methods and starts with a description of the EOR methods and explain their differences, then followed with explanation of how each method work to improve displacement efficiency ,after that screening criteria for enhanced oil recovery methods, and systematic decision analysis approach for selecting an alternative to improve reservoir recovery efficiency.

Crude oil extractions have been growing continuously worldwide over the years. The challenges for crude oil producers in controlling asphaltene and paraffin deposition in reservoir storage and processing are parallel with the ever increasing rise in

Normal pentane (nC5), normal heptane (nC7), and Dodecane (nC12) (provided by Fisher Scientific) were used as the hydrocarbon solvent for extra-heavy oil recovery (dead oil viscosity = 30,000 cp at 22 °C and dead oil density = 0.933 g/cm³). Table 1 lists some of the main properties of applied solvents.