This only works in foreign countries. In the US -- uniquely in the world -- drilling for oil results in the mass extinction of all species and earthquakes. ;') Though his papers remained online (along with his other faculty webpages) for some time after his death, the URLs I've stored no longer work.Recharging of oil and gas fieldsVertically stacked domains of hydrocarbons have been found in all cases where drilling was sufficient to display them. The consistent tendency to find hydrocarbons below any producing region has been given the name of "Koudyavtsev's Rule", after the important Russian petroleum investigator who discovered this effect and collected a very large number of examples of it from all parts of the world. This rule would be the consequence of a deep origin of hydrocarbons and a steady process of outgassing... [In Kuwait] [t]he extraction of g[r]oundwater at the shallow levels results in the disintegration of the barrier to the oil levels just below, and the water in the wells is suddenly replaced by oil. The delicate pressure balance that had established itself, just up to the level that the strength of the rock could bear, had been upset. Similarly in stacked domains of hydrocarbons, the lower domains will be opened quickly, once the upper ones had been depleted and the fluid pressure thereby reduced sufficiently. This process can be fast, just as it is in Kuwait, where we had the advantage that a different liquid (water) filled the upper domain, so that one could identify the rupture to the oil filled domain below.
by Thomas Gold
September 1999
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf090/sf090g08.htm
THE KTB HOLE
KTB = Kontinentales Tiefbohrprogramm der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
If you could drop a pfennig down the KTB hole, it would take several minutes to hit bottom, for this research drill hole has now penetrated to 7.5 kilometers. It is the second deepest man-made hole, after the Soviet 12-km hole in the Kola Peninsula. Drilled solely for scientific purposes, the rocks and strata encountered by the KTB drill bits have forced the redrawing of German geological maps. The “real” subterranean world turned out to be quite different from that inferred from both surface indications and the seismic and electrical probing of the depths. Three specific surprises are worth mentioning:
Temperatures in the drill hole rose far faster than predicted. The expected boundary (”suture”) between two old tectonic plates thought to exist at 3 km according to surface geology had not yet appeared at 7.5 km. Most interestingly, crevicular structure (crevices and pores) existed at almost all depths, even though theory said they could not because of intense pressures. And these voids were filled with fluids. P. Keher, a KTB scientist, was amazed at what the drill found:
“When I started 25 years ago, the idea was that the deeper you go into the crust, the drier it gets.”
(Kerr, Richard A.; “Looking — Deeply — into the Earth’s Crust in Europe,” Science, 261:295, 1993.)
Comment. Deep-living bacteria were not mentioned in the above article, but Soviet scientists claim to have pumped them up from 12 km down! Outer space may not be our final frontier despite the introductory blurb to Star Trek!
From Science Frontiers #90, NOV-DEC 1993. (C) 1993-2000 William R. Corliss
Thank you , sir.