Petroleum age is just beginning

Washington Times ^ | 8/15/03 | David Deming

[Cincinatus]

The oil has to be migrating into the deeper sedimentary layers from below

No it doesn't. Lots of oil deposits are structures created when folded and deformed sediments create traps that collect laterally migrated petroleum. A multi-billion dollar industry is built on just this effect.

Freepers like you just kill me! You find a couple of newspaper articles, misinterpret their significance, and then come on the net to tell people who actually make a living at this stuff that their entire livelihoods and professional careers are based on a lie. As usual, you are often in error, but seldom in doubt.

[biblewonk]

Yes we need more windmills, lots more windmills.

[spycatcher]

Now that the Caspian district booming and producing oil from deep basement rock, we're figuring out we can create our own boom in the Gulf by just drilling deeper as the fields are being refilled from below.

Running out of oil shouldn't be a concern.

"On April 16, Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, published a startling report that old oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico were somehow being refilled. That is, new oil was being discovered in fields where it previously had not existed.

Scientists, led by Mahlon Kennicutt of Texas A&M University, speculate that the new oil is surging upward from deposits well below those currently in production. "Very light oil and gas were being injected from below, even as the producing was going on," he said.

Although it is not yet known whether this is a worldwide phenomenon or commercially important, the new discovery suggests that there may be far more oil and gas within the earth's core than previously thought.

Prof. Kennicutt is not the first to suggest that vast hydrocarbon deposits may lie well below those currently known. In 1995, the New York Times reported that geochemist Jean Whelan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts had also found evidence that oil was moving upward into reservoirs from somewhere far deeper.

With growing improvements in technology that are making possible oil drilling at greater and greater depths, it may soon be economically feasible to explore and produce oil from these deep deposits..."

Now we're seeing the investment pour in. Facts are facts, and money talks.

Gulf of Mexico study links deep basement structures to oil fields; Demonstrating deep structural control

"...This study's findings are analogous with producing basins around the world and support the view that hydrocarbon migration pathways are basement controlled. For many explorationists, IGC's findings are a rude awakening."

[spycatcher]

It's only because people refuse to give Thomas Gold credit for his wide-ranging brilliance and don't know anything about where Russia is getting all their oil from.

He's not alone though. Lots of leading edge scientists have faced the same army of ignorant skeptics. The even greater Nicolai Tesla's body of work was never given the credit and recognition it deserved. We probably wouldn't have the power crisis we have today had he been recognized for his Einstein-like mind. Many would have ended up building on his work.

Instead we worshipped the asinine Thomas Edison who was able to always steal credit from others and tried to block scientific progress. Tesla's work is finally being put back into scientific perspective (and one day, textbooks).

Even the Smithsonian has ignored the greatness of Tesla's scientific contributions.

[tpaine]

--- then come on the net to tell people who actually make a living at this stuff that their entire livelihoods and professional careers are based on a lie.

-cinc-


You've slipped. Your bias is showing.
No one here called you a liar. Gold has an interesting theory that some in your industry are using to search deep. Ideas change our ways of doing things.
If you can't cope with new ideas, your entire livelihood and professional career may tank.
Live & learn, or take up crafts.

Hand weavers are in short supply.

[Sachem]

It looks to me like methane hydrate, an unusual chemical form in which under extremes of low temperature and high pressure water forms a lattice which holds methane (natural gas) without chemical combination, has much promise. Methane hydrate is found in stunning abundance in many places on the earth but especially under oceans of 1000 meters depth, or so.

See this (understatement): Methane Hydrates i The National Methane Hydrate R&D Program

Today, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that methane hydrate may, in fact, contain more organic carbon than all the world's coal, oil, and non-hydrate natural gas combined. The magnitude of this previously unknown global storehouse of methane is truly staggering and has raised serious inquiry into the possibility of using methane hydrate as a source of energy.