Posted on 11/29/2005 3:26:34 AM PST by ovrtaxt
At 30,000 feet down, where were the dinosaurs?
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
Developments in deep-drilling for natural gas present serious challenges to those who still maintain "Fossil-Fuel" theories as to the origin of complex hydrocarbon fuels.
The Western world's record for deep-well natural-gas exploration and production is held by the GHK Company in Oklahoma. From 1972 through 1974, the company engineered and drilled two Oklahoma natural-gas commercial wells at depths greater than 30,000 feet (approximately 5.7 miles) – the No. 1-27 Bertha Rogers well (total depth 31,441 feet) and the No. 1-28 E.R. Baden well, both located in the Anadarko Basin, and east-west trending basin in West-Central Oklahoma.
Since the company's founding in the mid-1980s, GHK reports drilling and operating 193 wells, the majority of which are below 15,000 feet, without experiencing a blowout. GHK's success ratio for all drilling operations, including wildcat exploratory drilling, from 1995 to 2005 has been 82 percent.
A study conducted by Mark Snead, Ph.D., the director of the Center for Applied Economic Research at the Spears School of Business at the University of Oklahoma (at Stillwater, Okla.), documents that commercially successful deep-well drilling for natural gas in Oklahoma has been proven beyond a doubt by experience in Oklahoma:
Oklahoma has long played an important role in the development of deep drilling. The first hole drilled below 30,000 feet for commercial production purposes was completed in Beckham County in 1972 ...
The Anadarko Basin has historically been one of the most prolific natural gas producing regions in the United States and is the location of most of the deep wells in Oklahoma. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 20 percent of the holes drilled deeper than 15,000 feet prior to 1991 are located in the Anadarko Basin, exceeding the number of deep wells in all drilling regions in the U.S. other than the Gulf of Mexico in the period. Through 1998, 19 of the 52 existing ultra deep wells below 25,000 feet were drilled in the Anadarko Basin.
Through 2002, the Potential Gas Committee reports that a total of 1,221 producing deep wells were completed in Oklahoma at an average depth of 17,584 feet, with 775 of these wells currently active.
The success with deep-drilling of natural-gas resources has been experienced across the United States:
The overall success rate of deep wells has been remarkably good. In a sample of 20,715 deep wells drilled in the U.S. through December 1998, 11,522 (56 percent) are classified as producing gas and/or oil wells, with gas wells comprising nearly 75 percent of producing wells. Of the 1,676 wells exceeding 20,000 feet, 974 (58 percent) are producing wells of which 847 are gas wells.
Dr. Snead reported that important technological advances have facilitated the ultra-deep drilling of natural gas wells. The average time to reach a depth of 17,000 feet for two East Texas deep wells drilled in the same structure reduced from 170 days to 70 days in the 17 years between 1985 and 2002. Moreover, advances in computer technology have produced breakthroughs in reservoir modeling that "enable better estimates of the size and location of recoverable deposits."
Many "Peak-Production" theorists appear today to be ready to abandon the "Fossil-Fuel" theory of oil's origin, as long as they are yet able to argue that we are going to run out of hydrocarbon fuels in just a few years from now. Still, the common wisdom remains that natural gas, like oil, is a "fossil fuel." For those who have any doubt that the "Fossil-Fuel" theory is the politically correct version of the origin of natural gas, the Energy Information Agency's "Energy for Kids" page explains how millions of years ago the remains of plants and animals decayed into organic material that became trapped in rocks until pressure and heat changed some of this organic material into coal, oil and natural gas.
Realizing the potential for the deep-well drilling of natural gas, the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy established a "Deep Trek" program to lower the cost and improve the efficiency of drilling commercially productive deep wells. "Deep Trek" maintains its "Office of Fossil Energy" bias despite describing deep-well natural-gas drilling as needing to penetrate rock structures that sound more like bedrock than sedimentary layers:
Tapping into this resource will be both technologically daunting and expensive. For wells deeper than 15,000 feet, as much as 50 percent of drilling costs can be spent in penetrating the last 10 percent of a well's depth. The rock is typically hot, hard, abrasive, and under extreme pressure. Often, in deeper wells, it is not uncommon for the drill bit to slow to only two to four feet per hour at operating costs of tens of thousands of dollars a day for a land rig and millions of dollars a day for deep offshore formations. And it is exceedingly difficult to control the precise trajectory of a well when the drill bit is nearly three miles below the surface.
In Japan, gas has been produced from granite at a depth of 4,300 meters (2.7 miles). Those who doubt that natural gas can be found in bedrock structures should visit the website of Teikoku Oil, a Japanese company that has developed drilling equipment specifically designed to explore for natural gas in and below bedrock levels.
Even those who might stretch to argue that even if no dinosaurs ever died in sedimentary rock that today lies 30,000 feet below the surface, might still argue that those levels contain some type of biological debris that has transformed into natural gas. That argument, a stretch at 30,000 feet down, is almost impossible to make for basement structure bedrock. Japan's Nagaoka and Niigata fields produce natural gas from bedrock that is volcanic in nature. What dinosaur debris could possibly be trapped in volcanic rock found at deep-earth levels?
Deep-earth natural gas strongly supports the theory that the origin of oil is abiotic, not organic in nature. Moreover, natural gas is being found abundantly at deep-earth levels around the world – so much so that the deep-earth discoveries of natural gas are increasing worldwide natural gas reserve estimates to the point where "Peak-Production" theories are being challenged as well. But that will have to be the subject of another column.
prisoner6
Any clues?
I never bought the dinosaur bit as a 2nd grader. That was also the year JFK got killed.
Petroleum under pressure
14 September 2004
Scientists in the US have witnessed the production of methane under the conditions that exist in the Earth's upper mantle for the first time. The experiments demonstrate that hydrocarbons could be formed inside the Earth via simple inorganic reactions -- and not just from the decomposition of living organisms as conventionally assumed -- and might therefore be more plentiful than previously thought.
Methane is the most abundant hydrocarbon found in the Earth's crust and is also the main component of natural gas. Reserves of natural gas are often accompanied by petrol, usually only a few kilometres below the Earth's surface. The possibility that hydrocarbons might exist deeper in the Earth's mantle, or could be formed from non-biological matter, has been the subject of debate among geologists in recent years.
To explore these questions further Henry Scott of Indiana University in South Bend and colleagues at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, Harvard University and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab subjected materials commonly found in the Earth's crust to temperatures of up to 1500°C and pressures as high as 11 gigapascals (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. to be published). These conditions are similar to those found in the Earth's upper mantle.
The set-up
The set-up
Scott and co-workers squeezed together iron oxide, calcium carbonate and water between two diamonds with flattened tips while heating up the device. The advantage of the "diamond anvil cell" technique is that the sample can be analysed in situ -- through the diamonds -- using a variety of spectroscopic techniques. The US scientists found that methane was most readily produced at relatively low temperatures of 500°C and pressures of 7 gigapascals or below.
The sample
The sample
In 2002 J F Kenney of Gas Resources Corporation in Texas and co-workers in Moscow found methane and other hydrocarbons in similar experiments. However, their apparatus did not allow them to follow the formation process in situ (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 99 10976).
Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton believes the results are important because they could help answer the question of whether natural gas and petroleum could be created inorganically. "If the answer turns out to be inorganic, this has huge implications for the ecology and economy of our planet," says Dyson.
However, Scott is more cautious about his team's results. "Although I believe the Earth's mantle could contain a significant quantity of even heavier hydrocarbons, I cannot constrain how much of this reaches the Earth's surface, or the extent to which it may augment resources that we exploit commercially," he told PhysicsWeb. "I do not want to suggest in any way that these hydrocarbons are likely to represent an untapped energy reserve."
About the author
Belle Dumé is Science Writer at PhysicsWeb
Matbe God created it?
You're too rational, stop that right now.
From the Sinclair web site -
From the Sinclair web site -
In 1930, Sinclair's advertising writers noted that Wellsville-refined lubricants -- the best in the trade -- derived from Pennsylvania grade crudes laid down more than 270 million yearsearlier. These oils were mellowing in the ground during the Mesozoic era when dinosaurs populated the earth. The obvious sales message was: the oldest crudes make the best oils. But how to dramatize this?
A series of advertisements in 104 newspapers and five national magazines feature a dozen of the strange dinosaurs, from hideous-fanged tyrannosaurus rex and three-horned triceratops, to the unaggressive, vegetarian apatosaurus (brontosaurus), a 40-ton lizard with neck and tail each 30 feet long. The campaign -- confined entirely to Wellsville oils -- was a great success. The curiosity value of it was tremendous.
Interesting, but certainly not conclusive. Natural Gas is found near Petroleum because organinic materials produce both. Just because methane can be produced non-organically does not logically mean that petroleum can as well. Given that oil has not yet been found in any place where plants could not have been, I will remain very sceptical.
Regardless, it sounds like it would be so expensive to extract that other sources of energy would be more attractive.
"Maybe God created it?"
Perhaps, but that would turn this into EVO/CREVO thread of which there have been plenty.
This article is full of misconceptions about gas and oil formation.
Oil does not come from dinosaurs. Oil is formed from the burial of organic material, chiefly plankton, in seafloor sediments.
Natural gas is not a complex hydrocarbon as the article seems to claim. Methane, for example, is one of the simplest hydrocarbons at CH4 and can be formed from biological processes (decaying organic material in a landfill or cow farts, for example. It is also found in the atmosphere (and as ice) in many of the planets and moons in the outer solar system. No one believes it's formed by organic processes out there.
Just because you can find some natural gas in the basement rocks (the igneous and metamorphic rocks below the sedimentary bedrock) doesn't mean you'll find petroleum there as the article seems to imply.
I do know that any hydrocarbon can be turned into any other hydrocarbon, it's simply a question of cost. As the market for drilled oil and gas goes up, other sources become more economically viable. It's in the current producers' best interest to keep oil more affordable than fuel from other sources- such as diesel from common garbage.
I don't buy the peak oil theory. I'm not personally in the industry or anything, just an outside casual observer. I have a feeling that there's plenty of oil around, but politically, we've been maneuvered into a position of vulnerability and dependency.
So the political cost must also be factored into any equation of the relative value of oil from enemy states as well. Sure, the dollar value of a barrel may be low, but the value of a defunded Saudi Arabia is worth how much?
Cow fart ping.
Rock on!
The surface of the earth is divided into tectonic plates that constantly dive and grind under one another. Therefore, some critters that died a few hundred million to a billion years ago certainly have had their remains taken down to 30,000 feet or more...
First, I know, I know! Never call you Shirley...
Secondly... See, there is an answer for everything!
Here's the thing: Oil is nothing more than polymerized gas.
Take CH4, methane, pressurize it and heat in in an oxygen free environment for a few huundred million years, like down 10 or 20 miles beneath the surface of the earth, subject it to other factors like the presence of unoxidized iron to take up any spare oxygen lying around, and you shouldn't be surprised if oil like, say C10H22, starts seeping up through cracks, especially in the vicinity of volcanos and faults.
And when you look around this old planet, what do you find? Just that. There is no real good reason to think that much of any of the Earth's gas and oil is anything but abiogenic in origin - other than the insignificant quantities of swamp gas and dump seeps you refer to.
I think God put it there. How He did it has not been revealed to me at this time.
This is not so. You have obvioulsy not heard of the Silurian Ring.
Bump for later reading
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