eli5 Why do North American oil wells have shorter lifecycles than wells in the middle east?
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A key measure for oil wells is something called “permeability”, basically how easy it is to move fluid through the rock. Contrary to popular cartoons, oil reservoirs aren’t big “caves” of oil underground, they’re spongy rock with oil in the holes. The more permeable the rock, the bigger an area can be “drained” by a single well.
Middle East oil reservoirs are ludicrously permeable…you basically stick a glorified straw in the ground and oil comes out, and it keeps coming out because that one well can drain a really large area.
Oil reservoirs everywhere else, including North America, tend to be less permeable. You need more wells to drain the same volume of reservoir and each well runs “dry” (can’t get reasonable flow out anymore) faster.
And then there’s fracking. North America has a ton of reservoirs that have very low natural permeability, so low that they can’t economically produce on their own. You have to frac them (artificially crack the rock and stuff it full of high permeability sand) to get anything at all. This works really well, but only as far as you can frac the rock. As a result, these run dry even faster and you need to drill bazillions of them to drain the same reservoir.
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