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Thanks for the bump, nopardons.
Sorry I was so long in responding; I just drove in from a drilling rig in South Texas where we were over 16,000' deep when I left.

Dog Gone, you've got some good logical reasons in your arguments, but I don't think some here will accept logic.
Maybe a little common sense will suffice:
Oil is NOT a renewable resource any more than water is a renewable resource.
Oil wells are depleted every day.
The ONLY way they can ever produce again is for more oil to flow into the reservoir through the permeable rock which allowed the reservoir to fill in the first place.

Oil fields are either gas driven or water driven.
When depletion occurs in the case of the former, there ceases to be enough gas pressure to drive the oil into the pocket.
When depletion occurs in the case of the latter, the water simply overtakes the oil that it is pushing and floods the pocket.
This is not rocket science - just plain common sense!

I have drilled over five miles deep in the Anadarko Basin in Oklahoma.
If anyone finds an oil well below 20,000' anywhere in the world, I'll personally fly him and his family to Houston and buy them the biggest steak in town!!
This again is common sense!
Under extreme temperature and pressure, OIL doesn't exist!
The breaking point in depth of the conversion of oil to natural gas and condensate varies according to the temperature gradient of the area in question.
The term "condensate" is simply the liquid component of natural gas which forms when it cools off as it comes up the wellbore.
It is not oil per se, but it is a lot more valuable than oil because of the ease of refining into useable products.

I've been in this business for over forty years.
Where does oil come from??
I haven't the vaguest idea, but I doubt seriously that the dinosaurs had anything to do with it.
I'd rather think that God did it.

Our energy future cannot depend upon oil.
It must depend upon our huge reservoirs of natural gas.
When the American people accept the advantages of using natural gas as the primary energy source, our energy problems will be solved.
The main reason this has not happened is that Big Oil has too much money tied up in it's overseas properties and they generate too much income.
They also have hundreds of gas wells, but the expense of shutting down the refineries which process our oil thirst cannot be offset by their gas sales.
How many advertisements do you see touting the advantages of natural gas?
Probably none, but you see hundreds of advertisements about the great results in economy and efficiency available because of some additive that one of the major oil companies have added to their gasoline.
Yet, we have thousands of vehicles of city, state and federal governments driving down the road using natural gas.
Doesn't this seem a bit incongruous?

Many thanks for some FACTS and common sense ! I knew that we needed a REAL expert on this thread. : - )

Thanks for taking the time to respond to this thread. I actually enjoy listening to engineers passing their practical wisdom on to the young ones. They have a way of reducing a lifetime of productive years to a few concise statements. Like Gurdieff said, most people don't do. But then, most people aren't engineers.

If anyone finds an oil well below 20,000' anywhere in the world, I'll personally fly him and his family to Houston and buy them the biggest steak in town!!

Well...one of the seven sisters was going to drill one to 25,000 ft. south of Pyote, but the mergers came first.

What do we have now, the four sisters?

Our company workload is down 60% right now, that is why I am home instead watching a rig turn right, first Thankgiving in ten years at home.

I'll add one more little tidbit which may dissolve some commonly-held beliefs. Just like oil isn't found in underground lakes or caverns, oil is NOT found in rocks that date to the age of the dinosaurs. It is found in rocks much older than those before dinosaurs ruled the world.

The origin of oil remains only a theory, and probably will always remain so, at least for our lifetimes. We can't recreate it in the labs so far. The best theory we have so far is that it was created from organic matter, usually decayed sea life, fish poop, and other nutrients which are continually deposited in the mud off the former coastline. As land masses lifted and sunk over the eons, the beaches continually moved inward or further out into the ocean. The beaches would create sand deposits which would bury the mud. The same principle would repeat itself many times.

The weight and pressure of the repeated deposits transformed the mud into shale, and the coastline into sandstone. Reefs were buried and compressed.

Somehow, over time, the organic material in the shales was tranformed into oil and gas which began seeping toward the surface. In those places where it was trapped in porous rocks or reefs, it has stayed until we find it today.

I think your offer, COB1, of a steak dinner for someone who can find deep oil is safe. If the Gomez field near Pecos, Texas, was gas then all such deep wells will be. The Permian Basin has cool rocks. Other places don't even have natural gas at those depths. It's so hot that the only gas that can exist is hydrogen sulfide (a few whiffs and you're dead) and carbon dioxide.

The idea that oil somehow survived those temperatures and moved up to shallow traps is fairly ridiculous.