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- Hi, I'm Mark Zoback, a professor of geophysics

here at Stanford University, and welcome
to Unconventional Reservoir Geomechanics.
- And I'm Arjun Kohli.
I'm a research scientist at Stanford,
and I'll be teaching about a third
of the lectures in the course.
- What we're going to do today in the lecture
is basically give you an overview of what's going to be
happening over the next 10 weeks
in the 19 lectures that follow.
Unconventional reservoir geology, unconventional reservoir
engineering, unconventional reservoir development has
changed the oil and gas industry in extraordinarily profound
ways and in a very short period of time,
and our definition of unconventional reservoirs
are those reservoirs whose permeability is so low,
we're often talking about 100 nanodarcys or something,
a million times smaller than conventional reservoirs,
hydrocarbons can only be produced
through horizontal drilling and multi-stage fracking.
So, that's our definition of unconventional reservoirs.
We'll be going into that in a lot more detail
in subsequent lectures.
In today's overview, we're gonna be discussing these
six topics that you see in front of you,
and we'll conclude with an overview of the syllabus,
so you can see the whole course laid out over the next,
over the next 10 weeks.
We'll start by talking about these reservoirs in general.
We'll talk about the challenges,
that the reservoirs deplete rather rapidly,
and there are low recovery factors.
We wanna introduce you to horizontal drilling
and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing.
We'll talk about the physical and transport properties
of these reservoirs, how to optimize production,
and introduce some of the environmental impacts
including induced seismicity.
Again, all of these are topics we'll be talking
much more about.
We just want to sort of touch these topics
to give you a sense of the material that's in the course.
What you see here is production of oil and gas,
gas is on the left, oil is on the right,
in the lower 48 states, over roughly the last 10 years,
and what you can see is from these four major reservoirs
on the left, where we're looking at gas,
and then other reservoirs are included in the gray area,
is just an incredible increase in natural gas production
over just the 10 year period.
10 years ago, the United States was building
natural gas import terminals.
Today we're building export terminals,
and it's literally changed the energy picture
in very profound ways.
After the 2008 financial crisis that hit the world,
natural gas prices dropped very rapidly,
and the technologies developed to produce natural gas
were then applied to tight oil, very low permeability oil
reservoirs, and you can see the result on the right,
just very, very dramatic.
Five million barrels a day or so more oil is being produced
by the United States today than was done a decade ago.
This has cut imported oil by half,
and the U.S. is on the way to becoming self-sufficient
in the use of oil and gas.
When you actually look at where these developments
are occurring around the country, this is a slide
prepared by ConocoPhillips.
You can see the oil reservoirs in green,
the gas reservoirs in red, and the recoverable reserves
that you see there are truly enormous.
These are on the scale of the biggest reservoirs
in the world, and the discovery
is actually not a discovery in the classic sense,
in the sense that we always knew the oil and gas was there.
What has been discovered is how we use horizontal drilling
and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing that makes it possible
to recover these resources in an economically viable way.
Now, while the unconventional reservoir,
unconventional oil and gas revolution
started in the United States and soon after in Canada,
and that's where most of the activity has been to date,
things are moving pretty quickly, and countries like China
and Argentina, and there are many, many countries
around the world, as shown in this graphic
with very large potential reserves of unconventional oil,
unconventional gas that could be produced
through this same technology.
So, it's a technology that, you know,
even after all of these wells that have been drilled,
it's still early days.
Now, the oil and gas industry doesn't
exist in a vacuum of course.
The oil and gas industry exists in a world
that's very conscious of environmental issues,
especially greenhouse gas emissions,
and the need to de-carbonize our energy sources.
(clearing throat) Excuse me.
This slide kind of shows of course the growth
in world population, stabilizing somewhere
between nine and 10 billion people by mid-century,
and these people are gonna need energy,
and that energy that we provide has to be economically
viable, it has to respect issues of national security,
energy security, it has to protect the environment,
and it has to conform to societal norms.
And as the world de-carbonizing, de-carbonizes, excuse me,
the oil and gas industry is gonna continue to play
a very important role at least through the middle
of the century, and so, the real question is
how we as a community will provide appreciably more
accessible, affordable, and secure energy
while protecting the planet, minimizing carbon emissions,
and minimizing other pollutants and environmental impacts.
This slide has appeared in many forms.
Basically, what it shows is the income per capita
on the Y axis versus energy use per capita on the X axis,
and the bottom line is quite, is quite obvious.
The more energy, excuse me,
the more energy you have, the more energy that's available,
the richer the country becomes.
Now, we want to be efficient.
We want to, you know, we want to
provide energy.
We want to improve per capita GDP
in the most efficient way possible.
In other words, we want this slope to be
as steep as possible, getting the most wealth
for the smallest amount of energy,
but the size of the bubble indicates the size
of the country, and as countries like China and India
move up and become wealthier,
we obviously want to see that happen
in the most efficient way possible.
But these two issues are inextricably linked.
And when we look at where CO2 is likely to come from,
what's shown here in red is that future CO2 emissions
are principally, principally going to come
from the developing world, the non-OECD countries.
The OECD countries shown in blue are
getting more efficient, rapidly.
They have well developed economies,
and they are going to be actually
probably emitting less and less CO2 as time goes on,
but the real challenge is how do we develop economies?
How do we use more energy while minimizing,
you know, future carbon emissions?
And that's especially true with respect
to natural gas and coal.
We know this because of what's happened
in the United States.
The tremendous quantities of natural gas that are now
available at low prices has led to a very rapid switch
from coal use for electrical power generation
to natural gas, and what you can see here is that
CO2 emissions have been dropping very rapidly
from the electrical power sector in the United States
as natural gas production has increased,
and basically natural gas not only is it abundant,
it's widely distributed around the world,
and this kind of fuel switching could play
an important role in providing energy,
but with a lot fewer greenhouse gas emissions
than are currently being emitted by coal burning power
plants, and you get a lot of ancillary benefits
about reducing many other pollutants, mercury, SOx, NOx,
particulate matter in particular.
Fuel switching works.
But when you actually look at what's happening
in the developing world right now, which is shown in red,
this is coal construction.
That's coal power plant construction
that's currently underway.
About 300 gigawatts of coal generating capacity
is being developed today in the developing world,
and to put 300 gigawatts in perspective,
basically that is the size of the coal generating capacity
of the United States today.
So, the fact of the matter is should the United States
some, through some, you know, overnight
mysterious process start generating electricity
with no carbon emissions whatsoever,
all the coal burning power plants are shut down,
they're replaced by zero emission sources,
the climatic benefits of that would be offset completely
by the coal burning power plants that are currently
under construction in the developing world.
So, while it's very important for the United States
and other OECD countries to de-carbonize,
and de-carbonize as rapidly as possible,
a big, big part of the challenge is what's happening
in the developing world.
And it's not just making electricity.
Energy access and energy poverty
afflict billions of people on Earth.
Two billion people have no reliable access
to electrical power, and have no reliable access
to a clean thermal fuel.
What I mean by that is this photograph that
I took in the Pamir Mountains of Western China,
this is at a elevation of about 4,500 meters.
These are Kyrgyz shepherds that bring
their yaks up to the high meadows in the summer time.
On top of this mud hut that you can see,
the summer house, that are used by the shepherds
you can see a solar panel.
You can see a satellite dish.
But you can also see a dung burning stove
which generates a lot of indoor air pollution,
and there are four million deaths per year
caused by indoor air pollution.
That's more than AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis combined.
So, having a clean thermal fuel
is really essential for the developing world,
and natural gas and natural gas liquids
can go a long way to meeting those needs.