Posted on 04/30/2022 3:18:57 PM PDT by know.your.why
Guy, if wells were replenishing there would never be a Cap and Abandon. Further, and maybe more precise, there would be no oil depletion allowance.
The depletion allowance is in tax law to provide the equivalent of depreciation on housing. Rental housing gets old via use. It loses value with age because of increased maintenance for normal accumulated damage. So the IRS says this asset has loss of value and the rental property thus can deduct that depreciation from rental income.
Oil fields owned by a producing company lists it as assets. Those assets pump out oil and lose value. The IRS thus allows an oil depletion allowance deducted from the proceeds of oil sales.
I’m not hammering you on this. I’m just jumping on it hard because conservatives by nature think abundance is forever. It is simply not with oil. It is finite and it will starve a lot of people eventually when trucks can’t deliver food to shelves.
Sakhalin’s claim to fame was offshore drilling from onshore. Angled outwards to get underwater. Ice over that water several months of the year.
Sakhalin is I and II btw. II is mostly gas and is served by Russia’s first LNG export port.
Peak oil has bipartisan hatred, btw. The left have always thought the concept of finite quantity was a right wing conspiracy to persuade everyone they have to drill more to overcome scarcity.
The right wing sneers at the concept of Peak Oil because of basic attitudes that worship the idea of abundance. Some of this is religious . . . God would never present us with a situation we could not solve (and make no mistake here, oil scarcity will kill billions from inability to transport food). Scarcity is also a concept that capitalism cannot confront. Presumption is always that a higher price will cause creation of product. Sort of correct, in that coal can be turned into oil, but only at about $1500/barrel, and the scale is very small.
I know that everything in your post 41 is true.
All I’m saying is that oil replacement happens.
The petrochemicals are abiotic.
I, like you am trying to state only facts in this forum. If I’m wrong, FReepers will point it out.
5.56mm
Interesting.
There is a fundamental understanding, or presumption, about the nature of the hydrocarbons.
When a diagram of the Earth sphere is drawn or visualized, how much volume exists in which there can be oil is the entire sphere, but only down 5-10 miles. No more than that.
The reason is temperature. The geology that makes oil disappear are a combination of earthquakes and temperature.
Earthquakes releasing the most energy are only about 25-40 miles deep. Why quakes matter is they occur at plate intersections and they have been going on at that locale for millions of years. If oil collected in some geology porosity in that locale, shallow, it won’t last millions of years. The rocks will crack, new permeability forms, and simply put, oil flows away and dissociates.
So . . . that’s depth. The deeper you go, the hotter it is, and oil cannot survive hot. It becomes nat gas. CH4 vs long chain CH bonds. They just can’t stay together, they dissociate. Oil ceases to exist. It becomes methane.
There is no proposed mechanism underground for hot methane becoming oil. It has to migrate upwards to cool temps and once there, there’s no reason for it to be anything but CH4.
Anyway, this is part of the “running out of the right geology” problem. It is rock of certain types and structures, anywhere around the world, but only down to a depth where the temp didn’t work on it millions of years to eliminate the hydrocarbons from oil form.
The age of the hydrocarbons is presumed to be the Carboniferous Era. Coal formed in the same period, entirely from plant matter buried in a swamp so there was no oxygen for bacteria to rot it. After millions of years of descent into the ground, pressures worked on it and created coal (note only down about 3 miles, somewhat max). Oil, it is presumed, had the same creation method, but not plant matter. Diatoms. Gazillions of them, buried so no oxygen and millions of years to process into oil.
In summary, you don’t find oil in earthquake zones. This caused Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had/have no oil because they have quakes and they were going to have to get it from Indonesia. The Navy had to be stopped from interception.
Alaska’s plate interfaces are nowhere near Prudhoe. It’s also why Europe has none to speak of south of the North Sea. Italy and Greece have quakes often.
There would have been no Pearl Harbor if Japan had oil. FDR embargoed oil from them to attempt to influence their war in China — focused on Manchuria which is now China’s primary and essentially only oil area.
California is widely understood as an exception to the rule because of a rare echelon anticlinal folding on the east side of the big fault. Oil production peaked in Cali at a bit over 1 mbpd, and has been in terminal decline now for decades. Currently at about 350K bpd. Out of the US 12 mbpd.
There is tar there. Probably harder to deal with than the Orinoco or Athabasca. Not likely to ever process at scale.
California is not a great place to rely on to save the trucks from diesel scarcity. New Mexico pumps more oil than California.
Alaska faults are in the south. Prudhoe is north coast. NPRA was re-evaluated downwards 90% for oil content about 10 yrs ago after exploratory drilling. Prudhoe is going empty and the only evidence of any oil in ANWR is circumstantial and discarded by experts. A full 2 years existed under President Trump for companies to fund exploratory drilling there. They passed. No one had any confidence it was worth the bother. May turn out to be the biggest needless political fight in history.
The US pumped out enormous quantities of oil through the 20th century. Illinois used to be a huge player. Now, nothing. Ditto Pennsylvania.
Oil can run out. It already has most places in the world. The German army at Stalingrad was fueled entirely from the Ploesti fields of Romania. 500K bpd then. 96K bpd now. Relentless decline.
If the left manage to ban fossil fuel they’ll have to light their bongs with matches.
At Astros games, there’s an oil and gas company that has an ad....
From popcorn to stadium seats, this game is brought to you by all things made with oil.
(Something to that effect. :)
>>said, “New Mexico pumps more oil than California.”
Yes as there are vast areas of Phreatomagmatic pressures (water and magma) taking place. Which is why we see a lot of fort Rock there. The pressure to form fort Rocks would apply down and upward making it a good place to find more oil deeper down.
>>
New Mexico production is shale, an extension of the Permian shale production from West Texas.
Thanjs for posting. Aren’t they also used for medical equipment?
Great list at that link, thanks.
I think most people know that, except uninformed liberals like Biden. But the graph makes a point simplisticly.
If you have enough sun panels! 🤠
Your points are factual, I didn’t realize anyone thought oil wells replenished themselves.
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