Doug from Upland will be interviewing David Schippers tonight on Radio FreeRepublic! This is a DON'T MISS SHOW!
Posted on 04/23/2002 4:48:26 PM PDT by visagoth
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:21 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
DEEP UNDERWATER, and deeper underground, scientists see surprising hints that gas and oil deposits can be replenished, filling up again, sometimes rapidly.
Although it sounds too good to be true, increasing evidence from the Gulf of Mexico suggests that some old oil fields are being refilled by petroleum surging up from deep below, scientists report. That may mean that current estimates of oil and gas abundance are far too low.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Spoken like a man who's been there, done that.
When I was in college, a friend told me that some scientists figured out that the Brazilian rain forests were actually twice as large as had been previously calculated. Since the amount of known lumber cut is a fixed number, the rate of deforestation is actually one-half of what was being reported.
A collective sigh of relief, you say? Not hardly. When the news broke in more popular science journals, the facts had been twisted to report that while the forests were twice as large as originally thought, it "followed" that deforestation rates continued unchanged and that twice as much acreage was being cut down than was previously thought!
The envirowackos always have a doomsday scenario or will make one up. Look for the spin to be that fuel consumption is actually higher than previously thought.
Doug from Upland will be interviewing David Schippers tonight on Radio FreeRepublic! This is a DON'T MISS SHOW!
I've been in that bottle for over 100 years, wee lad. I'll grant ye two wishes for releasing me!"
The Irishman thinks...Well, I surely would like a large bottle of Guiness that never gets empty.
Done, says the Genie. And sure enuff, the Irishman drinks on that bottle for nearly two hours and it just keeps refilling itself!!!
Finally, the Genie says..."Now wee lad, I've been in that damn bott'l for more than a century and I've got people to see and places to go. What would you like for your second wish, a gigantic house, money so deep it comes up to your knees, a bevy of beautiful women..what will it be?"
The Irishman ponders this while he sips his Guiness and replies...well, I think I'll have another bott'l of Guiness!
"Drilling deep into the crystalline granite of Sweden between 1986 and 1993 revealed substantial amounts of natural gas and oil. 80 barrels of oil were pumped up from a depth between 5.2 km and 6.7 km. "
Gold conned the Swedes into testing out his pet theory concerning astroblemes (meteor impact sites) and the occurrence of petroleum hydrocarbons. Ask the Swedes what they think about Gold's "theory". Abiogenic methane, degassing from the mantle, is a well-recognized phenomenon. Gold believed that it was the major source and building block for more complex hydrocarbons - as compared to the well-developed process of petroleum catagenesis. Gold's claim of obtaining "substantial" oil and gas from crystalline rocks is a misnomer. The scant amount of petroleum hydrocarbons found in the Siljan Ring astrobleme complex were most likely generated from organic, sedimentary rocks adjacent to the impact site, which were subjected to instantaneous great heat and pressure (as compared to long-term maturation of petroleum source rocks). One would expect the pitifully small amount of petroleum Gold found - especially in light of the surface oil seeps found in the area. No one else has taken him up on his theories since then. He should stick to astronomy.
There was an interesting study I read a few years ago. The were many smallish oil fields discovered on Texas railroad lands in the decades prior to the 1930's. When the big discovery made in East Texas drove the prices down, many of these older, small fields were shut in. Some of them sat for decades. Others had sporatic re-development. In a few wells, there were recorded reservoir pressure measurements prior to long shut in intervals. When prices spiked in the late 1970's, a few of these wells were re-entered and re-logged (primarily looking for bypassed, or behind pipe reserves). But lo! and behold!, reservoir pressures were found to be much higher than when shut in, and some almost back to original (estimated) pressures. There were only a couple of possibilities, of which natural recharge was one.
I'm not a petroleum engineer, but the geolgical concepts behind recharge are sound. It is however, a dynamic equation. Time is the crucial factor. Also, proximity to an active petroleum system (in oil field lingo - how close you are to the "kitchen") is essential.
This is in my "back yard." The offshore seeps at Coal Oil Point (so named because the early settlers thought the tars seeps were coming from underground coal beds) generally leak tarry oil at the rate of 100-150 barrels per day, depending on weather and temperature (1 barrel = 42 gallons). This area has been leaking at this rate for thousands of years. The seeps also emit a huge amount of natural gas. Back in the early 1980's, ARCO place two steel pyramids on the ocean floor over 20,000 sq feet of prolific gas seepage. The amount of gas collected was enough to supply the domestic gas consumption of a small city (25,000 people) - each and every day! This was the equivalent of several tons of reactive hydrocarbon pollutants. It kept the City of Santa Barbara in compliance with EPA requirements!
The environmentalists in the area still mislead the public by claiming that much of the natural seepage is coming from those "bad old offshore rigs." I have spent over 20 years of my career fighting such non-sense, but to little effect.
Note that I qualified my reply, as I'm not entirely sold on Gold's non-fossil fuel theories.
The fact that he's an astrophysicist, though, doesn't necessarily negate his earth science observations. I think some cross-pollination across disciplines, challenging the conventional wisdom and posing questions that aren't usually asked, is a healthy thing for science. In the specific area of hydrocarbons, for example, ascribing all gas and oil to ancient swamps and forests and dinosaurs may be satisfactory for petroleum engineers who are concerned only with finding it.
But when you take that to its ultimate, what does it say about the origins of methane in space? Did it get shaken off the Earth and sent flying in the same way meteorites are presumed to have gotten here from Mars?
Barring the infinitesimal chances of finding life elsewhere in the solar system, wouldn't the existence of hydrocarbons on other planets, should they be discovered in some future space probe, tend to make geologists want to rethink the conventional theories on gas and oil formation?
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