The international Ukraine Recovery Conference is taking place June 21-22 in London under joint sponsorship of the Ukrainian and United Kingdom governments. In the official documents for the conference, Ukraine and its international supporters envision the country becoming a major net exporter of natural gas – about 3.5 billion cubic meters (bcm) for annual net export by the year 2032, providing significant supplies to its western neighbors.
This would represent a dramatic change from Ukraine’s strategic energy position as measured in 2019. At that time, the country was a large net importer of natural gas – almost 10.5 bcm – much of this from Russia and Belarus. Natural gas is a national economic resource for Ukraine not simply as a heating fuel, and this is especially significant given global efforts to reduce or limit the growth of fossil fuel consumption. Natural gas is also the major feedstock for the petrochemicals that produce plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers and other global economic necessities.
Ukraine’s transformation from gas importer to gas exporter will require a better understanding of the exact location of the recoverable natural gas, as well as oil, in its subsurface. Ukraine is not projected to become a net oil exporter, but it could substantially reduce its dependence on oil imports by increasing oil recovery. In preparation for this week’s London conference, the former chief technology officer of BP, David Bamford, on April 28 hosted a symposium on this topic. Bamford is a renowned authority on the technological needs and prospects for improved monitoring of reservoirs of oil, natural gas, and other gasses including stored CO2.
The background to the issue of expanding Ukraine’s exploitable resources is the global phenomenon of low oil and gas recovery rates. Tens of trillions of dollars worth of hydrocarbons now are being left in the ground due to technological limitations. When a major oil field is said to be “depleted,” two thirds or more of the estimated total amount of the oil in the field may still be left in the ground.
Some large fields have much higher recovery rates. But in some complex geologies in large fields—in parts of the Permian Basin in west Texas for example—recovery rates are much lower. Due to dramatic decline rates, the overall recovery rates in shale oil and shale gas are typically under 20%. Either because it is too costly to extract or for lack of technology to understand the makeup and dynamics of reservoirs, the world’s energy resources are being severely underutilized.
The principal speaker in Bamford’s symposium was Ivan Karpenko, the head of regional exploration at Naftogaz, the Ukrainian state-owned oil and gas company. Karpenko described exploration prospects in deep-water Black Sea basins as well as gas fields in eastern Ukraine and in the far west of the country where underground resources are on both sides of the Polish-Ukrainian border.
Bamford, among others, stressed that finding and producing more natural gas and oil in Ukraine should be accompanied by major carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) programs. If massive CCS projects are undertaken, they will require the same sort of breakthrough technology that will be needed to understand where and how to extract more oil and gas. Bamford explains the severe limitations of occasional surface seismic and other current methods for estimating the resources within reservoirs. He has long been a champion of R&D and entrepreneurship to develop hitherto unavailable permanent downhole installations to monitor reservoirs.
For its part, the U.S. Department of Energy is seeking development of the same sort of technology for permanent, active downhole monitoring of CO2 storage. DOE is rightly concerned about the dangers of injecting underground as many as 6 billion tons of CO2 per year from the United States alone without reliable data on whether this gas will escape to the surface or seep into groundwater. The department is offering grants to hasten the creation of a new generation of powerful, rugged, durable electromagnetic methods, and probably seismic methods as well. Monitoring CO2 storage reservoirs in real time would permit a model that will predict future behavior for not just decades but centuries for sequestration to be safe and effective.
This week’s London conference rightly gives attention to Ukraine’s potential to supply clean energy to western Europe and to become a leader in safe CO2 sequestration. With breakthrough technology, this vision can become reality.
