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North Sea oil

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North Sea Oil Platforms
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North Sea Oil Platforms

North Sea oil refers to oil and natural gas (hydrocarbons) produced from oil reservoirs beneath the North Sea.

North Sea oil was discovered in the early 1960s, with the first North Sea oil coming on line in 1971 and being piped ashore at Teesside, England, from 1975, but the fields were not intensively exploited until rising oil prices in the 1980s made exploitation economically feasible. Inaccessibility and dangerous conditions offshore require complex and expensive production methods.

In reality, oil seeps had been known from coal beds on either side of the North Sea, but only a limited amount of development had occurred (Eakring oil field, Nottinghamshire, England; Edinburgh Oil Shales (which seem unrelated to later discoveries); and small discoveries in the Netherlands and Northern Germany). A "demonstration well" sunk in 1938 in association with the "World Petroleum Congress" at The Hague. After the Second World War a small number of onshore gas and oil fields were found in In 1959, an academic well sunk at Ten Boer near Groningen, Netherlands was deepened and discovered a significant gas deposit. Appraisal and development wells over the next few years brought the realisation in 1963 that the Groningen field was not just "economic", nor even "big", or "large", or "giant", but was an "elephant" field of huge potential. Given that, extending exploration into adjacent areas was a "no-brain" decision.

In large degree, the exploration of the North Sea has been a story of continually pushing the edges of the technology of exploitation (in terms of what can be produced) and later the technologies of discovery and evaluation (2-D seismic, followed by 3-D and 4-D; through-salt seismic; immersive display and analysis suites; supercomputing to handle the flood of computation required).

The North Sea contains the majority of Europe's oil reserves and is one of the largest non-OPEC producing regions in the world. While most reserves lie beneath waters belonging to the United Kingdom and Norway, some fields belong to Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Most oil companies have investments in the North Sea. Peaking in 1999, production of North Sea oil was nearly 6 million barrels (950,000 m³) per day. Natural gas production was nearly 10 trillion cubic feet (280,000,000 m³) in 2001 and continues to increase.

Brent crude (one of the earliest crude oils produced in the North Sea) is still used today as a standard reference for pricing oil.

North Sea oil production fell ten percent (230,000 barrels) in 2004, and fell an additional 12.8% in 2005. This was the largest decrease of any other oil exporting nation in the world, and has led to Britain becoming a net importer of crude for the first time in decades, as recognized by the energy policy of the United Kingdom. [link]. The production is expected to fall to one-third from its peak by 2020.

Contents

List of Areas/ Plays

A play is a collection of fields or structures with common features of source rock, thermal history, trap style and structure that make lessons from the discovery and development of one field on a play closely applicable to other similar structures. In approximate historical order:

List of Fields

(Mainly from the frontispiece map of Glennie, Petroleum Geology of The North Sea, 1998. Better criteria for inclusion could be chosen.) South to North. Associated, but not strictly North Sea

See also

External links

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