Posted on 04/16/2015 4:15:29 AM PDT by IBD editorial writer
The OPECKER lies started in the mid to late 1950’s.
One side of our family was in oil drilling,
oil production and gasoline production for decades.
Two of my cousins and I wanted to get degrees to work in what had been a good business for decades for our families.
We were told by relatives and older friends in the business not to waste our time and money on worthless degrees.
Then, we got the same advice at our colleges, our freshman years.
So, we and most of friends opted out degrees associated with the industry.
One cousin, got an architecture degree and worked in various refinery sites in the summers and planned to work with the company to plan new refineries and retro existing refineries.
After he got his degree, he was hired by the company his dad and uncle worked for. Before his first summer was over his department was down sized. He was assigned to designing new gas stations. Two years later, his east coast division was shut down, and he was unemployed.
He was devastated and ended up with a divorce. He went back to school and got his PhD. Besides being a professor, he did consulting with the refinery industry.
We were lied about our nation’s oil reserves for over 50 years.
Cui bono, who benefited from the decades of lies?
Not true. There are still billions of barrels trapped within the source rocks, hence the developing shale plays around the world. It is similar thinking to gold deposits. The placer deposits are what have “escaped” from the Mother Lode. Conventional oil and gas reservoirs are like the placer deposits. What we are tapping now in the Eagle Ford, Bakken, etc. is the Mother Lode. Go out in the Gulf of Mexico and look at the massive clouds of algae in the water. All of it eventually dies and what isn’t consuming by critters falls out into the bowels of the basin to become the future source rocks in a few million years, once they are buried down to 10,000’ or so.
It hasn’t been a lie. Those reserves were just unproducible in those days with the technology of the day. What has changed is the advent of horizontal drilling and multi-staged fracing.
If you took ALL life that EVER existed and it decayed perfectly into oil that would not explain the amount of oil found so far.
:: Go out in the Gulf of Mexico and look at the massive clouds of algae in the water. ::
Agreed, but there is a factor-of-reduction that must be allowed on conversion to oil. Carbon-based life forms hover around 90% water. There is simply not enough carbon-based material over the known/assumed cycle of life on Earth to account for the amount of O&G we have extracted.
That is, unless you are arguing that water is converted to petro-hydrocarbons?
That is my point.
:: It is similar thinking to gold deposits. ::
The difference:
Do we understand gold deposits to come from an ever-blooming source of carbon-based life forms? I think not.
Hydrocarbons are bubbling up from the mantle into the crust. That is my opinion.
It was just an analog. Gold and oil are two totally different topics.
Pricing is crazy.
Yesterday, we made our monthly Costco trip for food and gas.
Regular unleaded was $2.65/gal versus $2.95 one month ago at the same Costco.
For months our gas prices in Cali had been rising while prices were going down in other states.
Oil is not stable above a certain temperature. It breaks down in the earth to lighter and lighter components, just like what a refinery does. Granted, some methane may have come from the inards of the earth but not oil. Temperatures in the mantle are over 1,000 degrees.
Agreed, but I did not posit the equivalence...you did.
Determining reserves, in the US, is a price dependent number.
The details are such that you can have a great deal of oil underground, but you have “run out”. The reason is that oil is in rock. It’s not an ocean down there. It’s pores in rock that contain it and the pores may (or may not be) interconnected.
If they are not interconnected, perhaps a hundred yards apart, well beyond any fracking distance, then that oil is there but at any reasonable price it is going to stay there.
So you can get oil reserves quoted (technically AND economically recoverable) that go up AND down, just based on price. Fracking is a technology that has been around for decades. No particular new technology made oil flow from shale, nor got those reserves quoted bigger. What made that happen was high price and low interest loans to fund the activity. With price crashed, provided it stays crashed, the shale industry will be destroyed.
To harvest unrecoverable oil (unrecoverable per price and technical ability), you’ll need Star Trek transporter beam technology. Of course, for the most part, if you had that, you would not need the oil.
As an aside, how do you think that coal beds are formed?
:: Oil is not stable above a certain temperature. ::
Granted, at subsurface temp/press, crude can break down into lighter constituents but, that does not eliminate its physical properties (hydraulics) that would allow it to migrate to sedimentary formations in the form of liquid, gas or “heavy-gas”.
Current US production consists of not just crude (C11+) but of those lighter constituents: C2, C3, C4+, C5-C10+. Where did these come from?
NOTE:
C2-Ethane
C3=Propane
C4=Butane
C5-C10+=Natural Gasoline or “Condensate”
[Question: Do you use Saran Wrap?]
When it reaches the surface, your temp/press parameters are moot and the extraction from the formation is “fractionated”.
It is NOT mysterious to those who understand the various categories of “reserves” and how they are estimated.
Did I say “estimated?” That is right.
Good question. I do not have experience in coal-bed production. I’d be willing to be enlightened.
To my knowledge, coal beds may be recognized as transitioning from moss>peat moss>soft coal>hard coal>low-sulfur coal (PRB?). The presence of methane in any of these is an engineering estimate. While some moss/coal-beds have exhibited evidence of “fossils”, the overall mechanism appears to be temp/press influences within the crust, not specific to “decayed life forms”.
Do you posit that coal beds are a precursor to O&G, given enough time? The argument against that is the O&G production in North Africa...there are no massive attendant coal beds. Qatar? Yemen? Iran?
Given my limited knowledge, I’d posit that there are several tectonic influences in creating the large instances of moss/peat-moss/coal beds throughout the world. It does not equivocate to O&G deposits.
As an aside, the reason why the source rocks in many basins produce mostly gas and very little oil is that they are Type III kerogens, which is derived from terrestrial plants. Think of a big flood in the Mississippi River carrying all the plant debris out into the Gulf where it sinks to the bottom. Oil source rocks primarily are Type II kerogens while some freshwater lakes in the past in the Rockies areas for example have produced Type I kerogens, which has their own distinctive types of crude oils that result from them. I believe they tend to be very waxy.
Crusty I don’t think people realize how much material settles to the ocean floor on a daily basis and how it builds up over time. Nor do they realize just how much of the world was covered in water. On the ranch we find saltwater oyster beds in layers deposited along the hill’s. I think we’re 2300 ft above sea level yet at one time we were the ocean floor.
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