No, to learn what is there of course.
The deepest I have ever drilled is about 27,000 feet. All the way through the sediment and into the basement rock. Most wells were less than 20,000 feet in the Anadarko Basin. Across the world they were usually less deep than that.
I would go out to the shale shakers and pick samples and marvel that sometime in the past they were deposited as grains of something falling in an ancient ocean or washed from ancient rivers. In the Granite Wash formation they came from other ancient mountains that you could see in the distance on a clear day; so the pebble puppies told us.
In Utah we drilled a well that passed through nearly 18,000 feet of the same rock straight as an arrow until someone decided to run a dip meter and we learned it was the Ochre formation turned on its side. Less than 5 miles away another well was drilled and saw regular bedding. Imagine what took place to turn the world on its side at that time in the past? I can’t.
The subsalt basins are yet another fascination left when seas evaporated then the salt heated, rose and spread under the weight of additional sediments; so we are told. That is the simple version of it. Allochthonous salt is what it is called.
The oil found in the deep waters of the Gulf of America is an anomaly. At such formation depths it should be so hot that the mobile hydrocarbons should have cooked off leaving only tar at best but it is cooler there at depth than normal so they have not and they probably exist much deeper than we have drilled.
Fascinating and captivating business.
Continents move slowly, then all at once..................
We are not pebble puppies. We are trained scientists. But if you insist on poking fun at us, we prefer geolopher.
Oil in the Gulf of America is all about the geothermal gradient. Much of the gulf coast is much cooler than similar depths than say the Anadarko Basin, which has lingering at those depths for 200-300 million years. The sediments in the gulf could be as “young” as 1-5 million years.