OnShore

Onshore production is economically viable from a few tens of barrels a day upwards. Oil and gas is produced from several million wells world-wide. In particular, a gas gathering network can become very large, with production from hundreds of wells, several hundred kilometers/miles apart, feeding through a gathering network into a processing plant. The picture shows a well equipped with a sucker rod pump (donkey pump) often associated with onshore oil production. However, as we shall see later, there are many other ways of extracting oil from a non-free flowing well For the smallest reservoirs, oil is simply collected in a holding tank and collected at regular intervals by tanker truck or railcar to be processed at a refinery. But onshore wells in oil rich areas are also high capacity wells with thousands of
barrels per day, connected to a 1.000.000 barrel a day gas oil separation plant (GOSP). Product is sent from the plant by pipeline or tankers. The production may
come from many different license owners. Metering and logging of individual wellstreams into the gathering network are
important tasks...
Recently, very heavy crude, tar sands and oil shales have become economically
extractible with higher prices and new technology. Heavy crude may need heating and diluent to be extracted, tar sands have lost their volatile compounds
and are strip mined or could be extracted with steam. It must be further processed to separate bitumen from the sand. These unconventional of reserves may contain more
than double the hydrocarbons found in conventional reservoirs.