Opinon By: Kamiyar Deraney
When a war starts, the first thing everyone watches is the price of oil. The second thing is how many barrels are still being pumped. News headlines scream numbers: production dropped by this much, exports fell by that much. But as someone studying petroleum engineering, I see something the headlines miss. When an oil field stops producing, the damage is not just the barrels you did not get today. The real damage is the barrels you will never get، ever. Let me explain what happens underground when we turn the valves off.
An oil reservoir is not a tank of still liquid, it is a pressurized system. Imagine a pepsi bottle that has been shaken. That pressure is what pushes oil up through the well and to the surface. Natural pressure does most of the work. When you produce oil steadily, the pressure declines slowly, you can manage it. You can even help it along with pumps or by injecting water or gas back into the reservoir. But, when you stop production completely, something different happens. The pressure does not stay where it was. It drops, and it drops fast.
When the war ends and you try to restart that field, the pressure is much lower than before. No amount of pumping can bring it back to its original level. The reservoir has lost its natural energy and you will never again get the flow rates you had before the shutdown.
Here is the part that keeps me awake. Most oil reservoirs sit above a layer of water. It is called aquifer water, and it has been there for millions of years. The oil sits on top because it is lighter. As long as you keep producing oil, the water stays down there. The oil holds it back.
When you stop producing, the pressure drops and that water starts rising. Slowly at first, then faster It moves into the space where oil used to be. It fills the tiny pores in the rock. When you finally come back to restart the field, you do not find clean oil. You find a messy mixture of oil and water. Now you have to separate them, and that costs money. Lots of money. And some of the oil is now trapped deep in the rock, surrounded by water, impossible to reach. Once water breaks in, it never goes back down. The damage is permanent and this is the hardest number to accept. Every oil field has something called a recovery factor, that is the percentage of oil in the ground that you can actually bring to the surface. For a good field in Kurdistan or southern Iraq, that number might be 40 to 50 percent, the rest stays in the rock forever.
When a field shuts down unexpectedly, especially during war, that recovery factor drops. Sometimes by 5 percent, Sometimes by 10 percent or more. What does that mean in real numbers? Take a medium-sized field, If it had 500 million barrels of oil in place, a 10 percent loss means 50 million barrels will never be produced. Those are not barrels delayed they are barrels erased. Fifty million barrels at 80 dollars each is 4 billion dollars of lost value. Not lost this year, lost permanently. No technology in the future will bring them back. Bombs destroy visible things, they destroy pipelines and pumps and storage tanks. You can see the damage, You can take a picture, and you can calculate the repair cost, but the damage underground is invisible. You cannot see the pressure falling, you cannot watch the water rising, and you cannot photograph a lost recovery factor.
That does not make it less real, It makes it more dangerous, because no one talks about it. When the war ends and the headlines move on, the engineers will go back to the fields. They will turn the pumps on again, and they will get some oil flowing. But they will know, quietly, that the field is not what it used to be. Some of the oil is gone forever. And no peace agreement, no new contract, no amount of money can bring it back.
This is what I think about when I hear news reports say “production has stopped.” Behind that simple sentence is a reservoir losing pressure, water moving into places it should never be, and barrels disappearing from the future. The headlines will forget but the reservoir never does.
