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Explosiveness of Bakken Crude

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  • Member since
    September 2003
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Posted by Overmod on Monday, January 5, 2015 1:11 AM

Technically I suppose the 'best' comparison would be using lease condensate rather than 'gas condensate' -- the more critical question being where the condensates closer to 45 than 75 API gravity are being transported by rail in the United States.  If I am not mistaken, much of the 'diluent' for things like oil shale or heavier crude to be pipelined is sourced from condensate, and I have seen discussions that diluent would become more and more extensively backhauled (by rail) if things like Keystone XL were built. 

Here is a reference with a bit more detail on the actual differences in the 'spectrum' of these materials.

.  A petroleum reservoir engineer on a different forum points out:

Labeling hydrocarbons as "oil" or "condensate" is pretty arbitrary. Even the "oil" vs "gas" distinction is only relevant at conditions where both could coexist together. Many reservoirs are at temperatures and pressures where only a single phase can exist, and there are quite a few for which the temperature is so close to the critical temperature of the mixture that it's not at all obvious whether reducing the pressure will evolve bubbles of vapor or droplets of liquid (those can be pretty tricky to produce efficiently). There are some for which the temperature, pressure, and/or composition variation with depth give them fluids which are "gas" in top (because they condense liquid on depressurization), "oil" in the bottom (because the evolve vapor on depressurization), with no gas-oil contact in between.

He also has some detail to add to how the distinction between the 'oil' and 'gas' derived fractions can be made or assessed:

Where it gets *really* interesting is when multiple parties own different interest in reservoir "oil" (and the gas evolved from it) and "gas" (and the condensate precipitated from it). There's at least one really important field where the distinction between "oil" vs. "condensate", and even "gascap gas" vs "solution gas" is really important to the involved parties' revenues ...

In such a case there has to be a way to discriminate the fluids for equity determinations. While those methods are devised with some sort of technical justification to hopefully treat liquids derived from reservoir vapor as condensate and vapors derived from reservoir liquids as solution gas, in the final analysis they boil down to contractual terms.

Mixing lawyers with engineers, geologists, and geophysicists is often interesting to watch but *never* much fun to do.

  • Member since
    September 2008
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Posted by aegrotatio on Monday, January 19, 2015 11:39 PM
Is there something similar to "railbit" that can be used to convert the Bakkan crude into something less volatile?

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