‘Exploding oil?!’ The Middle East is about to find out

By David Goldman, CNN

(CNN) — The moment of truth is just about here.

The Strait of Hormuz has reopened, for now, and Middle Eastern countries that shut off their oil wells during the war (the term is actually “shut in”) are about to turn those valves back the other way and find out what they’ve got.

It could be a gusher. Or, if President Donald Trump’s predictions were accurate, a series of underground explosions could cause the oil wells to deliver a trickle.

That’s highly unlikely. But, as with most of Trump’s sensational claims, there’s at least a kernel of truth to it.

Box of chocolates

Shortly after Iran effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz to foreign tankers, local energy producers ran out of places to store the accumulating oil and gas. Many neighboring Middle Eastern wells had shut in their production. The threat of drone attacks forced several Saudi, Emirati and Iraqi facilities to shut in during the war, too.

Iran had to shut in its own wells this month after the United States started blockading the strait.

Shut-ins are not like flipping off a light switch. They represent a complex engineering challenge that involves serious physics and meticulous planning over the course of days or even weeks.

When oil wells are shut in, the pressure underground can become imbalanced, deforming the underlying structure. Those changes can damage reservoirs, which can create similar problems for nearby wells, too. Water can seep in, reducing the well’s potential output.

“The worry is what happens when you turn things back on,” said Vikas Dwivedi, global oil and gas strategist at Macquarie Group. “It’s like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get.”

Extended downtime can also damage equipment. Pumps and lift systems can easily become corroded. Sand and debris can settle in. Concrete casing and tubing – used to seal and extract oil – can lose integrity, causing leaks and potential hazardous gas releases.

And, yes, in rare cases, explosions.

Exploding oil?

A couple months ago, Trump wouldn’t stop talking about the possibility.

• April 23, Oval Office: “If they don’t get their oil moving, their whole oil infrastructure is going to explode. You know what that means? Because they have no place to store it and because they have no place to store it, if they have to stop it … something happens underground that essentially renders it in very poor shape and you never recover fully.”
• April 26, Fox News: “When you have, you know, lines of vast amounts of oil pouring through your system, if for any reason that line is closed because you can’t continue to put it into containers or ships, which has happened to them (they have no ships because of the blockade), what happens is that line explodes from within, both mechanically and in the earth.”
• May 4, Hugh Hewitt Show: “You know, their oil, when you turn off the oil, underground, and the mechanical too, but underground has a tendency in like almost 100% of the cases, to literally explode and just destroy everything around it. And you can never get that oil again.”

But the way Trump described it isn’t moored in reality. Serious damage – let alone an explosion – almost certainly didn’t happen during the course of the war, oil industry analysts agree.

“A key question is whether prolonged shut-ins could translate into permanent production losses,” said Natasha Kaneva, head of global commodities strategy for JPMorgan. “These risks are likely overstated.”

Wells have been shut in for extended periods before, including in Iran.

During the early days of the pandemic, when basically no one was traveling anywhere, the world ran out of room to store fuel that no one wanted, and oil was literally selling for negative dollars. Producers around the globe shut in their wells without any significant or lasting damage.

Some Middle Eastern suppliers have also temporarily shut in their wells when OPEC production caps kicked in.

The oil industry, even in a country as economically battered as Iran, handled the problem just fine then. It is well equipped to handle it again this time around.

And shut-ins can sometimes benefit a well, Kaneva noted: They can rebalance the underground pressure, and even more oil comes out than before.

Flipping the switch back on

Restarting production at the end of the war isn’t like flipping a switch, either. The problem just works in reverse.

Production will need to be restarted – slowly, over several weeks – to ensure crude reservoirs don’t collapse, requiring re-drilling and substantial repairs. Producers will have to balance underground pressure as they inject water and gas into wells to extract the oil.

Because wells in the region are large and close to one another, restarting production will require significant coordination across companies and countries to ensure consistent pressure across multiple wells. Otherwise, cave-ins, leaks and catastrophic damage to wells can occur.

Any time a well is shut in, a producer runs the risk of reduced oil flow when it’s restarted. To prevent that, some operators maintain low oil flow rates, akin to dripping a faucet in freezing cold weather to avoid frozen pipes.

But the industry knows all this. Iran has plenty of experience dealing with shut-ins and restarts.

Don’t expect an explosive end to this particular story.

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