Next Up For BP - Potentially Serious Underperformance At Thunder Horse Project

[hatrack]

With BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in the news, the world’s interest is now focused on deepwater oil production. BP has another deepwater platform in the Gulf of Mexico—Thunder Horse—where it has been working some for some time. My analysis suggests production is not going well as planned at Thunder Horse.

Thunder Horse field created huge excitement when it was discovered in 1999 in Mississippi Canyon blocks 788 and 822. Partners BP and Exxon announced that the field had a billion barrels of reserves. After nearly two years of production history on the field, it is becoming obvious to most outside observers that Thunder Horse field is not performing as it was expected to perform, if one is to believe the press accounts and specifications of the production facilities. If the field is underperforming, as the data available from the Minerals Management Service seems to indicate, this should be of concern and interest to those in the Peak Oil community, and to the world.


Figure 1 - Thunder Horse Oil Production in Thousand Barrels per Day, based on data of Minerals Management Services

Thunder Horse was designed with an oil production capacity of 250,000 barrels a day. Clearly, it never hit that level, and seems to be already declining. If the field really had a billion barrel of producible oil reserves, it would take 11 years of production at 250,000 barrels a day to reach this amount—something that looks very unlikely to happen. There seems to be no production plateau, and it appears that production may be declining by as much as 25% per year. Natural gas production capacity for Thunder Horse is 200 million cubic feet per day. Production for natural gas doesn’t look any better.


Figure 2 - Thunder Horse Natural Gas Production in Million Cubic Feet per Day, based on data of Minerals Management Services

While it was designed to hit 200 billion cubic feet of gas per day, it never really hit that level, and also seems to be declining at around 25% per year.

EDIT

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/52659