Mike Adams warns that Persian Gulf oil wells face permanent physical damage within two weeks of shutdown due to water coning and wax clogging, with productivity dropping 20-30% even after restart. He argues Iran's Strait of Hormuz closure, framed as a response to US military presence, risks global scarcity and catastrophic flaring akin to the 1991 Gulf War fires. Ultimately, prolonged disruptions will keep prices elevated for years, causing long-term infrastructure damage to the world economy, food production, and transportation systems despite temporary port gluts. [Automatically generated summary]
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Oil Wells Won't Just Flow00:15:05
So, there's been an inaccurate assumption this entire time that if the Strait of Hormuz opens back up, then all the oil will start flowing again.
We can just turn the tap back on.
The oil and the gas and everything will just start flowing again.
It turns out that is not physically true.
So, you may have become aware that there are, well, flare offs happening right now in Iran.
So, at the top of some of the towers above the oil wells, They've been set on fire, so they're basically just burning off the oil.
And you might wonder why?
Why are they burning off the oil?
And the answer is they can't stop the flow.
If they stop the flow, bad things happen, and we lose some percentage of the oil capacity that used to exist in those wells.
That's why they're burning the oil right now, because the alternative is far worse.
And this is not only true for Iran, it's true for UAE, it's true for Kuwait, it's true for all the Persian Gulf countries that are impacted by this.
And you may not know the details of all of this.
I certainly didn't, even though I'm a Texan.
Doesn't make me an oil drilling expert automatically, even though we have a lot of oil industry in Texas.
But I had known in a general sense that, yeah, you have to keep them flowing, but I didn't know exactly why.
What bad things happen if the oil stops flowing?
And so, of course, I unleashed my AI agents to do a little bit of research on this point.
I learned a few important things that I want to share with you.
It's important to understand that a lot of Iran's wells are considered low pressure wells, which means the oil is not just, you know, spurting out of the ground at high pressure.
It's, frankly, barely moving.
And in some of these wells, they have to actually pump in adjacent drilling, they have to pump in.
Gas, you know, to provide pressure to try to push the oil out of all the fissures and all the different nooks and crannies where the oil is found.
And in these low pressure wells, especially, the fluids underground really aren't moving that quickly.
And if you let them stop, then you get clogs.
I'm going to go over some of that here, but you should know that according to JP Morgan, their oil analyst, Iran has about two weeks of maybe additional capacity before things get quite bad.
And they're either going to have to start just burning massive amounts of oil or dumping it somewhere or, I don't know, paying people to take it, you know?
Maybe oil prices will go negative again like they did during the COVID years, but for a completely different reason.
But see, you've got to understand that water and oil are very often found together.
I remember when I lived in Wyoming and I was talking to oil experts there.
They said, you know, you see all those rigs out there that are pumping oil?
Like, yeah, I see them.
I said, well, they're mostly pumping water.
They're pumping more water than they're pumping oil.
And then the oil is separated from the water.
I did not even know that, but it turns out that's a very common thing.
So there's water.
Sometimes there's gas that's in solution in the water or in the oil.
And the pressure systems are very delicate.
It's a balanced system when it's flowing.
And then when it stops flowing, then you start to get water encroachment into the different zones of oil.
In the oil industry, this is called water coning.
You may have heard that term, water coning.
And then that will actually trap a large amount of oil behind the water where the oil can't get through.
And so this means that some of these oil wells can permanently lose their capacity or their flow rate or both.
And it's not uncommon if you study this, again, I had my AI agents look at this, it's not uncommon for oil wells to lose 20 or 30 percent of their flow rate after some period of stoppage.
That stoppage could be as little as five days, or it could be a few weeks or a few months, or even in extensive cases, more than a year, like during the war involving Kuwait and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Kuwaiti oil wells.
were shut off for an extended period of time.
Many of those came back and some of them didn't.
Some of them had to be redrilled at great expense, a process requiring a lot of time.
Now, there's another problem, which is that based on changes in the temperature gradients of what's happening underground and the movement of water and oil and other fluids, you can end up with things that are precipitating out of the oil that function like paraffin wax.
In fact, They really are paraffin waxes, and what are called asphaltines, which sounds like asphalt.
It's kind of like that.
And basically, they clog the well bored tubing and the pores of the surrounding rocks.
And so, this can cause, of course, massive problems, which will block off, it will clog up fissures so that oil is stranded in pockets that can no longer be reopened.
you know, without extensive time and effort and expense.
So the thing about Iran is that its oil fields are well known to be mature oil fields, which means they no longer have high pressure.
They're low pressure fields.
They've been tapped for decades, most of them.
And they actually depend on the reinjection of natural gas to maintain pressure in the reservoir.
So if you lose that pressure, then you're going to get what's called Relative permeability blocking, which is what I mentioned before.
You're going to have water and oil blockages with different precipitates coming out of it that will choke off the flow of the oil.
And that is a very real risk for the entire world because it means that as bad as the Strait of Hormuz closure has been and continues to be, even if there's peace tomorrow, you can't necessarily turn everything back on.
So there's some percentage of the oil.
That will not come back for years, no matter what.
And the longer this goes, the worse the problem gets.
Now, it's generally known in the oil industry, according to my research, that if shutdowns happen for a few days or a few weeks, that rarely causes permanent problems with capacity.
But the more you shut down, the more wells you shut down, the longer you shut them down, then you have a much higher risk of volume degradation.
And there is a report out there that my agents found that says that because of the low pressure status of the Iranian oil fields, that some of those can break in as little as four days of being shut down.
Others would take longer.
Typically, it's believed in the oil industry, according to my research, that it takes at least two weeks of a full shutdown for this permanent damage to start to happen.
Again, it's common for productivity losses of 20 to 30 percent when you restart those wells.
You're just not producing as much oil.
So, and even successfully restarting the well, you know, just because things are flowing doesn't mean that it's oil flowing.
You're getting more water and less oil in many cases.
So, this is obviously a very real risk to the entire world because we all know that, what, 20 to 25 percent of the world's oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz typically?
and something like maybe 20-25% of the natural gas supply and a third of the fertilizers that are seaborne fertilizers, etc.
The fertilizer is not such a big deal because it can sit there.
The gas is not such a big deal because the gas wells are normally functional again and don't have to be repaired.
But the oil wells are the real problem here.
If we reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which could still take months to happen, I mean, there's really no end in sight between the talks between Iran and the United States, and however Israel is going to sabotage this thing, there's no telling how long it's going to take to reopen the Strait.
But when it does reopen, we're not going to have the oil flow that we once had.
Now, remember, this same problem affects Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia.
Qatar, of course, Bahrain, you name it, right?
So this isn't just an Iran problem.
This is a massive problem across the entire Persian Gulf.
And it shows that for every day that the Strait of Hormuz is closed, there is some level of semi-permanent damage being done to the world's economy that does not have a quick recovery.
So this is infrastructure damage.
to the world.
It's energy infrastructure damage that cannot be reversed.
And very few people understand that.
Of course, everybody in the oil industry knows about all of this and much more.
But outside oil investors and oil drillers and oil industry technical people, most people don't know that this is how it works.
They think you can just turn it all back on and it all starts flowing again.
And that's not how it works.
So in other words, if this closure continues for a few more months, it's either going to be a shocking Environmental, you know, catastrophe for Iran and these other countries to just flare off and just burn everything that comes out of the ground to keep the wells flowing.
And that they will do that.
And you may recall back in the 1990s, Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein set fire to all the oil wells, or at least some portion of them in Iraq.
And it took American companies, I don't know if you recall this, it took American companies, I believe it was more than one year just to put out the fires.
because those were kind of uncontrolled fires where you detonate the oil well on purpose to set them on fire and create horrific conditions for the U.S. invading soldiers.
It was an act of war.
And that was an environmental catastrophe.
And who knows how many billion gallons of oil got burned up that way.
We could have a similar situation happening yet again.
And I wonder if it's enough to actually, dim the sun.
I mean, that would take a lot of oil, obviously.
And I don't think that those clouds typically go high enough to stay in the atmosphere for very long.
So I'm just guessing.
But there could be some climate effects of this that maybe we haven't considered yet.
I'll have to dig into that more to find out what those might be.
But I guess it all just depends on how long this goes on.
But if you think about it, it's crazy that.
Oil is, in a sense, it's compressed sunlight energy in chemical form.
And every gallon of oil or a refined oil product like diesel is extraordinary in terms of how much work it stores.
It compresses work into a liquid format that is just astonishing.
I was thinking about this.
I was moving some dirt a couple weekends ago with a compact track loader.
It's got a big 96 inch bucket on the front.
I was moving some really heavy waterlogged dirt.
Actually, some of it was clay.
It's called clay and dirt that was wet, really waterlogged.
And I would scoop up this 96 inch bucket.
I think it's 9, maybe it's only 84 inches, but it's a wide bucket.
Or maybe it's 92 inches.
Maybe that's what it is.
Anyway, I would scoop this massive amount of dirt up and then I would drive it up a hill.
And then I would dump it on top of the hill because I was trying to rework some dirt.
And I was thinking to myself, man, if I had to do this by hand, you know, one load would take me like a day or actually more than a day.
And yet, this is probably taking less than 120th of a gallon of diesel, you know?
It's incredible the amount of work that's it.
Like, I can lift dirt a long distance and up vertically, like, Thousands of pounds at a time on a tracked vehicle just burning diesel, and it hardly uses any diesel.
It's pretty amazing.
And if we are burning off this oil, then that is wasted work potential for human civilization.
That's work that should have gone into transportation or farming, you know, food production or the manufacture of lubricants or.
diesel electric trains or barges or ships or whatever.
That's work that's being literally burned up and wasted.
And that's going to hurt humanity because humanity only exists due to the work potential of fossil fuels for the most part.
I know there's wind and solar on the power grid, but in terms of heavy equipment and trucking and transportation and construction and all of this and ocean freight trains, you name it, you know, look, it's hydrocarbons.
Cheap Oil Then Shipping Leaves00:07:32
And if we don't have those hydrocarbons, then the world doesn't function at the level that it used to.
And then everybody gets a little bit more poor.
Everybody loses out on the benefits of that fossil fuel.
And so, since the Strait of Hormuz is closed because of Trump's war of choice against Iran, we have behind the Strait, that is to the west of the Strait or the northwest of the Strait, we have way too much oil.
Way too much.
So much they're going to have to just set it on fire.
And then to the east of the Strait, the rest of the world, we have not enough oil, extreme scarcity, and people about to go hungry.
Think about it.
Think about it.
We have the resources that we need for abundance and affordable food and affordable transportation, but because of Trump's war on Iran and his refusal to negotiate any realistic peace, we have this incredible imbalance where the solution, the very substance that can solve these problems of food and transportation and energy and industry, etc., is locked up behind the closed street.
Wow.
Now, I know you might say, well, Iran closed the strait.
Yeah, Iran closed the strait in response to Trump's attack because closing the strait is the only leverage that Iran really has remaining.
Iran is basically saying to Trump and the world, you either stop attacking us or the whole world's going to suffer from lack of energy.
And that's where we are right now.
So if Trump were to back off and leave, then the strait would obviously reopen.
So it's Trump's decision to have the military presence there that is causing this strait to be closed.
Remember, the strait has been right there adjacent to Persia for thousands of years, since the beginning of Persia.
It's not ours.
It's not our strait.
So we really have no business being there.
And because we're there, that's why it's closed.
So until it's open, the world is going to suffer the consequences of wasted energy, wasted abundance.
And if you think about it, Other forms of catastrophes, such as the pollution stemming from all of these flare offs.
And even when it does reopen, again, we won't have the same productivity and flow of oil.
We're going to lose, I mean, we could easily lose, let me see here.
Yeah, we could lose 6 million barrels a day or something like that in terms of capacity, even after it all reopens.
Now, that's more of a high side estimate.
Maybe it's only.
4 million barrels a day.
That still, that counts.
That's a big deal.
Now, one other point to mention here before I wrap this up is that when the Strait of Hormuz does actually reopen one day, oil is going to be unbelievably cheap for a very short period of time because countries like Iran will be begging tankers to come take some.
Just come get it.
Practically free.
We'll just give it to you.
Just come freaking take it.
The problem is there won't be that many tankers available because, of course, thousands of them are locked up in the Persian Gulf right now.
And probably a lot of shipping companies maybe don't want to take the risk because of the instability that they've witnessed.
Maybe the insurance companies don't want to insure those vessels.
So probably tanker shipping is going to be in short supply even after the Strait is reopened.
And all the tankers that are there in the Persian Gulf, they're already loaded up.
For the most part, they're just going to leave.
They're not going to take on new loads.
They're going to leave, and they've got weeks before they get to a destination.
And then they offload there, which also takes maybe a week or at least a few days.
And then how are you going to find a crew to go back to the Persian Gulf?
Who's going to sign up for that mission?
Like, oh, that sounds awesome.
Yeah, let me get on a ship and maybe get stuck in the middle of a war for months with no food and water, you know, away from my family and kids or whatever the situation is for these people.
Who's going to sign up to sail back to the Persian Gulf?
And the answer is not many people.
Or they'll have to pay much higher wages for that.
Would you sign up for that mission?
Not on your life.
Not a chance.
So that's the reality of what we're facing here.
Oil transportation is going to be suppressed, even if things reopen.
Now, I did say oil prices would be very, very low for a short period of time.
But that's at the ports in Iran.
Like oil might be close to zero there at Karg Island, where Iran is begging companies just come and take it.
That won't last very long.
And there are, of course, transportation costs on top of it, and there are refining costs on top of that.
So it doesn't mean that you'll get free gas at the gas station.
Never.
That will never happen.
But you could see spot oil prices plummet significantly towards zero for a short period of time.
Maybe they could possibly even go negative.
But if that happens, it would be a very short duration.
Maybe only a matter of 10 days or something, and then.
prices would start to recover as shipping recovers, etc.
But it's going to take, what, a year for the international shipping to kind of settle out because of all these disruptions?
Maybe a year is even optimistic.
I don't think we're going to get back to normal shipping for a long time to come, frankly.
So keep all that in mind, folks.
This is important stuff.
And the energy infrastructure is being, Seriously damaged on a semi permanent basis.
For every day that this war continues, human civilization suffers even more economically, with food, with abundance, productivity, industrial output you name it.
Every single day is a day of damage to the global economy.
So let's hope this gets resolved soon for the sake of humanity and especially those countries that are just barely getting by right now.
A lot of countries in Africa and Southeast Asia in particular.
Some Middle Eastern nations are also suffering quite a lot.
So, the situation is pretty tense, as you know.
All right.
In the meantime, get prepared for chaos and disruptions in the power grid.
Check out our sponsor, the satellite phone store, sat123.com.
That's sat123.com.
And then also, of course, you can check my videos and interviews at brightvideos.com.
And then you can read my articles at Naturalnews.com.
So thank you for listening.
I'm Mike Adams.
Take care.
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